I have been doing some dusting on projects and workflows and while at it, easy deployment of changes is a recurrent issue. Simply synchronizing files between the local development environment and the production server is generally not a problem… However, at least on projects up to a certain scale, you will often want to also synchronize website data, such as the database and file uploads.
Writing bash scripts is not very fun and there are plenty of task managers available (Mina, Rocketeer) that make it much easier. Yet, when it comes to a traditional PHP stack, for some reason they all seem framework-specific or overly opinionated. After some more research I settled with Robo, which does exactly what I require.
A typical deploy flow might look like this:
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