A project can be primarily released in two ways
Incremental Release
Full Release
Incremental Release is done in big projects which has multiple modules & usually few modules gets updated between two releases. It makes sense to include only updated modules in release archive and during deployment only update those modules in application server.
Full release is usually done in small projects where the release archive contains all the components and then this release archive can be deployed to the application server as a whole
Both incremental & full release strategy has their pros & cons, where full release strategy scores in simple release archive generation & deployment incremental release has upper hand in space usage by only having modified components in it, although it brings overhead when doing rollback.
Release Steps in Incremental Release Strategy: If you are following incremental strategy in general you need to perform following steps
1.) Checkout the latest code for the release
2.) Generate the list of components which needs to be deloyed for the release
3.) Generate the release archive based on the list of components
4.) Stop the server(If hot deployment of components is not available)
5.) Take the backup of existing application on application server as we may need to do rollback in case of any issues
6.) Replace the components in application server with the components in the release archive
7.) Start the server(If hot deployment of components is not available)
Release steps in Full Release Strategy: As explained earlier Full release strategy is fairly simple, steps involved are:
1.) Checkout the latest code for the release
3.) Generate the release archive for whole application
4.) Stop the server(If hot deployment of components is not available)
6.) Deploy the release archive to the application server
7.) Start the server(If hot deployment of components is not available)