Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by Senior Engineer and Team Lead Bec White who has some thoughts regarding deployment, and why it's so important to do so early and often not only for your internal process but also to help bring a site to life for your clients.

Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is our short podcast with a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager at Palantir, and today’s advice comes to us from Bec White, Senior Engineer and Team Lead, who has some thoughts regarding deployment.

Bec White [BW]: My name is Bec White, and I want to talk about deploying early and often

On a project, I feel It's important to get deployments running as early as possible. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but my two favorites are not solving problems at the last minute, and bringing the site to life for clients.

I mean, number one, I'm not a firefighter. I don't want to solve problems under pressure, I want to solve problems beforehand and then have my team look like wizards later.

There's this idea that with Drupal that you don't have to know the target environment, that you just make a drupal site and then you can put it anywhere.

But in practice, though, there's always something about the environment that always affects the build: whether it’s the php versions, whether it’s setting up http redirects (on apache vs nginx), whether it’s your single sign on integration, search servers, varnish config, just to name a few. And for the Drupal-specific hosts, there are other things, like how the settings.php file is managed, and where the Drupal root lives in the repository.

So always when you run a project on a new environment, there is *something*. You can make as big a laun