Troubleshooting deployment issues

It is nearly inevitable that there will someday be an issue within your deployment workflow. These issues can range from something as simple as forgetting to include a file in your put, or as complex as overriding your environmental configuration. Whatever the issue may be, it is best to have a contingency plan for this rainy day. Tools are ever your friends, troubleshooting included. The cornerstone of any deployment issue is a bulletproof diff tool. Diff tools allow you to compare the contents of two files or folders. Take, for example, you mistakenly published an old version of your application. You could use a diff tool to compare your local development source code with your remote production source code to tell you which files are out of place. Most diff tools sport similar interfaces that allow you to select two folders or two files to compare against each other. Diff tools are like using a magnet to find a needle in a haystack; they will narrow the...