What is a deploy script?

Question

Conversation:

Me: How do we do the swap over though? Won't there be downtime no matter how we do it?

X: Well, we will need to do a complete deploy script of all the steps that must be completed. then we can see where the downtime might happen

Is it simply a complete test/dummy deployment or is it some form of planning/testing analysis?

Feel free to migrate this to a more appropriate SE site if there is one.

Solution

The example conversation you provided sounds an awful lot like the conversations I hear on a regular basis.

In my context (IT), deploy scripts are typically actual scripts (BASH or ant targets) that push code from source code control to a non-development tier. However, sometimes management will characterize "all the steps" that it takes to move from development to production as "the deployment". These steps include provisioning servers, creating databases, modifying configuration files, and a host of other system administration tasks. All of these steps might be considered a script (though I've seen these referred to as a "punch list", or a "go-live list").

Long story short: the meaning of deploy scripts depends on who's in the conversation and the context, but it typically means an actual script.