When I work with some mates in a side project, I need to give them access to the server. This is a quick tip about how to easily do it using GitHub and Ansible. The solution is simple and elegant.

Imagine that a new developer joins your team, installing everything needed for developing, including the application being developed is not an easy o fast task. I’m sure you have a wiki process, a markdown file in your repo or something similar. For a normal PHP web application, there is so much to do: installing PHP, composer and global tools, npm and/or bower, mysql, redis, etc. or setting up you Docker/Vagrant environment if you choose an isolated environment.

I remember when GitHub released Boxen in 2012. A tool for managing Mac development boxes with love. It’s based in Puppet. The main idea is use Puppet for provisioning not remote machines or servers but you local Mac. Let’s see a silly idea about how to do it with Ansible.

For a long time, Capifony was, without any doubt, the facto option for deploying Symfony2 applications. Capifony is a ruby gem based in Capistrano v2, an open source tool for running scripts on multiple servers with a deployment flow built-in. It’s primary use is for easily deploying applications. While it was built specifically for deploying Rails apps, it’s pretty simple to customize it to deploy other types of applications. At that time, alternatives were shell scripting or Fabric. Now there’s a better one, Ansistrano.