The last web company I worked for had an app that required a little extra care and feeding to deploy, and we just didn't use configuration management for that.

The last web company I worked for had an app that required a little extra care and feeding to deploy, and we just didn't use configuration management for that. There were plenty of other uses for config management (changes to rewrites in httpd.conf, for example). We used bash scripts for handling deployments, which primarily relied on distributed ssh and rsync to perform upgrades. (I believe this is the fabric use case, though it didn't exist at the time and I've never used it) The app was already documented, source-controlled, version-controlled, and tested by developers and QA. There wasn't much benefit to adding anything to the configuration management repository unless there were platform/infrastructure changes.