The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial showing you how to deploy your applications with Deployer, a simple deployment tool that aims to make it as easy as a single command to release you application to production.

Everybody tries to automate their development process, testing, code formatting, system checks, etc. This is also the case for deploying our applications or pushing a new version to the production server. Some of us do this manually by uploading the code using an FTP client, others prefer Phing, and Laravel users will prefer Envoyer for this process. In this article, I’m going to introduce you to Deployer – a deployment tool for PHP.

To introduce you to the tool they walk you through the deployment of a demo application, a simple tool that was used in a previous tutorial to connect to the 500px API. They help you get it installed and start in on some of the basic configuration:

• setting up the target servers and environments
• using SSH authentication
• defining basic tasks
• making use of "zero downtime" releases
• using some common built-in tasks

Finally, they link to a recipes section on the Deployer website that gives you more advanced and wider reaching examples.