Deployments Redesigned! Featuring SSH command deployments, now easier & more powerful

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Alex Hillman

Over 3 and a half years ago we launched the first version of our automatic FTP deployment tool. It’s since grown to be one of the most popular features in Beanstalk. Across all of our repositories, our customers have configured 1 deployment environment for every 4 repos. Amazing!

Today, we’re excited to announce the newest version of Beanstalk Deployments. We’re confident that this is the easiest, fastest, and most powerful version yet.

What are Beanstalk deployments?

If you’ve never used Beanstalk deployments, let’s catch you up. Our deployment tools allow you to instantly deploy your sites and applications to your web servers in one step. You can manually or automatically deploy code hosted in Beanstalk to your development, staging, and production environments over FTP, sftp and now using SSH commands.

What’s new?

If you already use Beanstalk deployments, you will love the new features.

More intuitive workflow and design

The interface got a big update. It’s now easier to view the status of each environment along with the current version and what was recently deployed. Access to editing and updating servers and environments is faster to navigate to as well.

Execute SSH commands directly on your servers

Starting today, Beanstalk deployments are more powerful and flexible than ever with SSH deployments. Previously you could only upload files and trigger web hooks. With SSH deployments you can now run a set of commands or pre-written scripts directly on one or many servers at the same time. For instance, if you use capistrano, you can have deployments execute the command “cap production deploy” just by making a commit!

Automatic release notes

The real power of deployments tools is improving communication. Keeping your team informed on what was deployed and when avoids mistakes and keeps your development process moving forward. With our new release notes, any team member can quickly see what was included in the latest deployments, even tickets associated with the deployment if you integrate with Lighthouse, FogBugz or Sifter.

Ability to cancel a deployment

For some of you, this has been a long time feature request. You can now cancel a deployment that is in progress if something is wrong, allowing you to quickly recover if you deployed the wrong revision or code.

Deployment email notifications

Another popular feature request, deployment email notifications allow each person to optionally receive a beautifully designed HTML notification on deployments that succeed or fail. Each notification includes full release notes on who initiated the deployment, what was deployed and the status of the deployment.

Try Beanstalk Deployments Today

This is just a taste of what’s included in our latest release. You can review our full changelog to see everything, or try out the new Beanstalk Deployments right now!

Beanstalk Deployments is included completely free in every Beanstalk account, so you can get started with these new tools right away.

If you’re looking for more information about how they work, you can check out our newly redesigned features page about Deployments, or read our help article.