I break more of these rules than I obey. 1. version control. get it. force it to be used. I use SVN but I'd recommend using git or mercurial. Doesn't matte

I break more of these rules than I obey. 1. version control. get it. force it to be used. I use SVN but I'd recommend using git or mercurial. Doesn't matter as long as it's a newer one (CVS, yech). 2. automate. automate everything. You should be able to run a commit, then click a button to update your new staging server. One click deploy to production. ALSO - make sure you can one click UNdeploy. I'd suggest writing shell scripts that will automatically check out the correct revision, move pointers around, change permissions, etc. 3. Make all your environments as similar as possible (same versions of code, etc.) Other than that, I can't think of much. You don't need to use capistrano to manage your deployments -- just use some simple shell scripts with rsync! I'd recommend that your production and dev servers (hardware or VPS) be different. That way if you screw something up while developing, it wont put a load on your production system.