From github to beanstalk

We use Git to manage our code. There are many reasons for this and although it doesn't matter what you use, i'm sure we can all agree that not using some form of version control is a practice long considered extinct by those who care about their code.

Until very recently we were using Github for our online repositories. This worked well, Github is all kinds of genius with many shiny toys and (in our experience), decent reliability and uptime. There was one thing wrong with it for our workflow though. In a word, deployment. We had been working locally, committing and pushing to github then transferring our files to the server over SFTP. This gave us an extra step, a missing link or an additional point of failure in our workflow. Call it what you will, we considered it an extra step. I'm sure someone will pipe up and tell us there are a number of options here which could have meant staying with Github but to be perfectly honest, we wanted a single solution to remove the extra step and make our lives just that little bit easier when it comes to shipping code. We settled on Beanstalk.

The cost of running a Beanstalk business account compared to what we were paying for Github private repo's is also very favourable. We get 50 private repo's in Beanstalk for the same cost as 20 private repo's in Github. Win.

The first time you see a deployment happen after pushing your code is magical, I'm still in awe of it to be honest. It's also taught us the importance of having a proper branching and merging process in place so we can automatically push things live on a staging server or to the production environment.

I'll say as little as possible about being able to deploy code from my iphone at the bus stop.

Great service and i'd thoroughly recommend it. If you want to use Beanstalk, this is our referral link. It gets you 10% discount on your first month. I have no idea what we receive as a reward.