Pushing code to a remote server the volo way.

The side-project I’m working on is coming along nicely, and so I figured it was time to let other people see it. Now, I could just have everyone huddle around my screen, but since many of the people who would be interested aren’t in the same city (or even same timezone) as I am, that wouldn’t work out so well. We tried screen- sharing, but a lot of what’s being worked on is animation, and the frame-rates of the screen-sharing application we were using weren’t up to the task. To get around that, I could have recorded a video, but since a lot of the value of a prototype like this is being able to play around with it, that’s also not a great solution. So, obviously, the best thing to do would be to put it on a publicly available server, and let people run it in their own web browser, whenever they wanted!

Now, I’m running a server or two that I could put it up on, but since the project is related to Mozilla, and since Mozilla offers some personal webspace on one of their servers, I figured I might as well put it up there. :)

So, to make it easy for me to remember to build and upload the code (and to prevent me from trying to figure out all the correct options to rsync every time I wanted to upload the code), I took a couple of minutes to add a command to my volofile, which lets me merely type volo deploy, and have it optimize the code, and copy only the changed files to the remote server.