How Flow Project Management automates website deployments

Flow is a popular, flexible project and task management software, used by teams in companies such as Apple, Shopify or TED.

It is designed by the people behind Dribble — probably the largest community of web designers.

Software Stack

The Flow marketing site is a simple Node.js & PHP app that uses DigitalOcean, Fortrabbit & AWS CloudFront for hosting:

We wanted a tool that could be as simple or robust as we needed it to be. Buddy was easily able to scale from a simple test runner to a full CI suite as needed.

– says Dan Castello of getflow.com

Pipelines

Flow’s pipelines are all well-crafted and self-explanatory. The way how they keep it all organized makes it an example of well executed continuous delivery workflow. Here’s the pipeline responsible for delivery to Production:

It was great to see we could easily implement something similar with minimal setup with Atomic Deploys. Makes tracking releases and rolling back super easy.

Delivery to Staging looks neat as well, with the application dockerized in one of the steps:

Flow also uses Buddy to monitor the website for downtime and send a notification in case there’s something wrong:

Castello praised the simplicity of both the application and the onboarding process:

Buddy was super simple to setup. The pre-made actions are great, especially for someone that’s new to the tool. Once we had a clear understanding of the capabilities of Buddy, we were able to fine tune the pipeline to our needs.

The pipeline system is extremely clear. Onboarding a new developer to the system is as easy as walking them through each step of the pipeline. Everything you need is laid out in each step. There are no buried configs or environment variables.

Last but not least, it was our support that was called the #1 feature. So proud!

Probably the best thing about Buddy has been the support. Using the Intercom widget in the app is great. You guys have been super helpful!

Thanks Dan, always a pleasure working with you guys!

🔥 Sign up at buddy.works to automate your deployment now! 🔥