Common conventions and practices

There is a set of common conventions and practices for deployment that not every developer may know but that are obvious for anyone who has done some operations in their life. As explained in the chapter introduction, it is crucial to know at least a few of them even if you are not responsible for code deployment and operations because it will allow you to make better design decisions during the development.

The filesystem hierarchy

The most obvious conventions that may come into your mind are probably about filesystem hierarchy and user naming. If you are looking for such suggestions here, then you will be disappointed. There is of course a Filesystem Hierarchy Standard that defines the directory structure and directory contents in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, but it is really hard to find an actual OS distribution that is fully compliant with FHS. If system designers and programmers cannot obey such standards, it is very hard to expect the same from...