Here’s a fun one. If you’re running Nautilus (which you probably are, if you’re running vanilla Ubuntu), this will allow you to copy one or more assets to one or more app servers with a right click.
Firstly, you need to open the script:
vi ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/"Upload to app servers"
Then paste:
file_count=0
dir="`echo $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_CURRENT_URI | sed 's/file:\/\///'`"
for arg
do
full_file_or_dir="$dir/$arg"
relative_file_or_dir="`echo "$dir/$arg" | sed 's/\/path\/to\/local\/root\/directory\///'`"
rsync $full_file_or_dir loginuser@appserver.com:/path/to/remote/root/directory/$relative_file_or_dir
# Add other app servers here if you want...
file_count=$((file_count+1))
done
zenity --info --text "Uploaded $file_count files to app servers"
After saving the above example, when you right clicked a file in Nautilus, you’ll see a “Scripts” menu option, which, when expanded, would have an option called “Upload to app servers”.
Upon clicking that script, the relative path of the file in your /path/to/local/root/directory will be copied to the corresponding location in /path/to/remote/root/directory on your appserver.com server. You can select multiple files and upload all at once. After uploading, a zenity message will pop up telling you how many files were successfully copied (requires the zenity package, apt-get install zenity).
So for example, if you right clicked the file /path/to/local/root/directory/myfile.txt, and picked “Upload to app servers,” the file would automagically be copied to appserver.com as /path/to/remote/root/directory/myfile.txt.
This script has proved very helpful for uploading post-deploy fixes to multiple app servers without redeploying the whole lot of them.