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Deployment and Distribution
Welcome to the last chapter of this book; we have come far and learned a lot along
the way. By now, you should have a clear idea of everything involved in working
and developing custom extensions for Magento.
Well, almost everything, as with any other Magento developer your code will
eventually need to be promoted to production or maybe packaged for distribution;
in this chapter we will see the different techniques, tools, and strategies that are
available to us.
The final objective of this chapter is to give you the tools and skills to do
deployments with confidence and with little to no downtime.
The road towards zero-downtime
deployment
Deploying to production is probably one of the most dreaded tasks for developers,
and more often than not, it will be improperly done.
But what is zero-downtime deployment? Well, it is to production with confidence,
knowing the code is properly tested and ready, this is the ideal that all Magento
developers should aspire to.
This is achieved not by a single process or tool but by a combination of techniques,
standards, and tools. In this chapter we will learn the following:
• Distributing our extension through Magento Connect
• The role of version control systems in deployment
• Proper practices for branching and merging changes
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