Binary, source, and script software deployments

Software can come in all shapes and sizes. So, software deployments are not a one size fits all affair. The standard means of deploying software are directly as a binary package, through source code that needs to be compiled into a binary package, or as a script. We will dig into each of these as it is necessary to understand what each is and when they might be appropriate.

Compiled and interpreted software

Many system administrators have never worked as developers and often are not aware of how software exists. There are two fundamental types of programming languages: compiled and interpreted.

Compiled languages are written in one language (source code) and run through a compiler to produce binary executable code that can run directly on an operating system. This can be an oversimplification, but we are not developers and need only be concerned with the original code being compiled into a binary format. For Linux, this format...