Im trying to test different things on Azure, and i have tried to setup a static webapp.
The github repo consists of nothing really.
These files are pretty much empty. Whenever i push something to the repo, the build triggers, but fails with the error Oryx built the app folder but was unable to determine the location of the app artifacts. Please specify the app artifact location through the Github workflow file.
Im uncertain of what it means with artifacts. This tiny webapp doesnt have any real build or anything
In the azure-static-web-apps-xxxxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxx.yml file the app_artifact_location is " "
Not really sure which artifacts its looking for, or what they are really.
You may want to investigate this Quickstart: Building your first static web app.
To add to this app_artifact_location is the location of the build output directory relative to the app_location. For example, if your application source code is located at /app, and the build script outputs files to the /app/build folder, then set build as the app_artifact_location value.
In step Build and Deploy builds and deploys to your Azure Static Web Apps instance. Under the with section, you can customize these values for your deployment.
Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/static-web-apps/github-actions-workflow
Based on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/static-web-apps/overview
Python-based frontends are not supported. Clients are served statically and are browser-based apps. The build system (0ryx) likely unable to determine the framework and is generating the error message you are seeing.
The default web page that is expected is index.html. It looks like you may have misspelled it = index.hmtl
Related
We have a new project in which we are trying to make use of the built in continuous integration in Kentico for tracking changes to templates, page types, transformations etc.
We have managed to get this working locally between two instances of a Kentico database, making changes in one, syncing the changes through CI and then restoring them up to the second database using the Continuous integration application that sits in the bin folder in the Kentico site.
The issue we are having is when it comes to deploying our changes to our dev and live environments.
Our sites are hosted as Azure App services and we deploy to them using VSTS (Azure DevOps) build and release workflows however, as these tasks run in an agent, any powershell script we try to run to trigger the CI application fails because it is not running in the site / server context.
My question is, has anyone managed to successfully run Kentico CI in the context of an Azure app service? Alternatively, how can I trigger a powershell script on the site following a deployment?
Yes, I've got this running in Azure DevOps within the release pipeline itself. It's something that we're currently rolling out as a business where I work.
The key steps to getting this working for me were as follows:
I don't want to deploy the ContinuousIntegration.exe or the repository folders, so I need to create a second artefact set from source control (this is only possible at the moment with Azure Repos and GitHub to my knowledge).
Unzip your deployment package and copy the CMS folder to a working directory, this is where you're going to run CI. I did this because I need the built assemblies available.
From the repo artefact in step 1, copy the ContinuousIntegration.exe and CI repository folders into the correct place in your unzipped working folder.
Ensure that the connection string actually works for the DB in your unzipped folder, if necessary, you may want to change your VS build options in regards to how the web.config is handled.
From here, you should be able to run CI in the new working folder against your target database.
In my instance, as I don't have CI running on the target site it means that everything is restored every time.
I'm in to process of writing this up in more detail, so I'll share here when I've done that.
Edit:
- I finally wrote this up in more detail: https://www.ridgeway.com/blog/web-development/using-kentico-12-mvc-with-azure-devops
We do, but no CI. VSTS + GIT. We store virtual objects in the file system and using git for version control. We have our own custom library that does import export of the Kentico objects (the ones are not controlled by Git).Essentially we have a json file "publishing manifest" where we specify what objects need to be exported (i.e. moved between environments).
There is a step from Microsoft 'Powershell on Target Machines', you guess you can look into that.
P.S. Take a look also at Three Ways to Manage Data in Kentico Using PowerShell
Deploy your CI files to the Azure App Service, and then use a Azure Job to run "ContinuousIntegration.exe"
If you place a file called KenticoCI.bat in the directory \App_Data\jobs\triggered\ContinuousIntegration - this will automatically create a web job that you can can trigger:
KenticoCI.bat
cd D:\home\site\wwwroot
ren App_Offline.bak App_Offline.htm
rem # run Kentico CI Integraton
cd D:\home\site\wwwroot\bin
ContinuousIntegration.exe -r
rem # Removes the 'App_Offline.htm' file to bring the site back online
cd D:\home\site\wwwroot
ren App_Offline.htm App_Offline.bak
The company I currently work for has a solution with 3 projects.
_Common... which was originally a Web project, but then changed to a Class Library.
Website1... Which is a website
Website2... Completely different website.
In Azure, we have a Deployment configuration so whenever our BitBucket Repo gets a checkin, it should build and deploy the solution.
Unfortunately, it seems like _Common is getting built as the target project. Which is breaking Azure.
ALSO Unfortunately, we have Two DIFFERENT Products (Website1 and Website2) which are in Two Different Azure Apps. They are both looking at the same BitBucket Repo, and both building whenever a checkin happens... but both are building _Common.
Can I have our "Website1" Azure App build the solution with Website1 as the startup project, and have our "Website2" Azure App build the solution with "Website2" As the startup project?
This obviously won't work to set the default project in Github, since we still need two different builds with two different startup projects.
You certanly can!
Go to your "Website1" Web App and go to Settings > Application Settings.
If you are using .Net Framework 4.5 or lower
Add a setting called Project, which value points to the CSPROJ file you want to build, using the full path from the repository root folder.
If you are using ASP.NET Core 1.0 / ASP.NET 5
Add a setting called Project, which value points to the folder that contains the project.json file of the project you want to deploy, do not include the filename in the path.
I have created an Azure Web Site and connected it to Visual Studio Online, and this automatically set up a continuous deployment build (as per this page).
Initially this worked for a solution with one project, but now I have added a Web API project as a back end. This is named such that it is the first of the two projects alphabetically, and so now it is the only project that gets built and deployed whenever files are checked in. Which leads to my question:
How can I modify the default continuous deployment build to deploy both applications?
I'm sure it must be a fairly simple change to either the build template or parameters, or the publish profiles that are being used by the build. The only problem is I don't know: A) how to change those settings in the default TfvcContinuousDeploymentTemplate.12.xaml build template, and B) how to modify the publish profiles that are used in the continuous deployment build.
I have already, from within Visual Studio, manually published the two projects and got them to deploy to the right locations by following the instructions in this answer. I right-clicked on each project, clicked publish, then selected the "Microsoft Azure Web Apps" publish target which (after filling in all the settings) added the publish profiles to my projects and allowed me to manually deploy them how I wanted.
Unfortunately there seems to be no way to re-upload those publish profiles so that they can be used in the CD build. I've checked them into source control, I just need to know how I can get the CD build to make use of them. How can I do this?
After reading through the first link in my question again, I noticed that you can edit the build definition (or template) to point to the publish profile that you want to use:
Path to Deployment Settings: The path to your .pubxml file for a web app, relative to the root folder of the repo. Ignored for cloud services.
Unfortunately, this both doesn't work and only allows you to specify one publish profile file. Presumably, even if specifying this argument worked, the build would still only deploy the first app in alphabetical order.
This lead me to this question and answer though, which suggests that the Azure/TFVC continuous deployment works simply by using the ordinary Web Deploy arguments to MSBuild. Looking at the diagnostic logs of my build in Visual Studio Online proved this to be the case; here are the relevant arguments:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\bin\amd64\msbuild.exe /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:CreatePackageOnPublish=true /p:DeployIisAppPath=mysitename
So, as per that question, to use a specific publish profile you can just set the additional necessary MSBuild arguments in the build definition:
Each project needs to have a publish profile called "publishprofilename.pubxml", in this case, checked into source control. I found that the user name (which is your site name with a dollar sign in front of it) is not needed, but unfortunately the password string is required. If you don't include it you get an error like this in the build:
Web deployment task failed. (Connected to the remote computer
("[mysitename].scm.azurewebsites.net") using the Web Management Service,
but could not authorize.
No other arguments were required for me, but it doesn't seem ideal that the password has to be included. The default deployment setup, without using publish profiles, must be authorising with that password somehow, but I don't know how.
So after making this change I navigated to [mysitename].azurewebsites.net, and it appeared that still only the Web API project was being deployed. However, by going to console for the site and entering dir D:\home\site\wwwroot I can see that both projects are actually being deployed. It's just that both projects are being deployed to the root of the site, at D:\home\site\wwwroot. The DeployIisAppPath settings are different in each publish profile, but these values are being ignored. This is because the /p:DeployIisAppPath=mysitename argument to MSBuild (mentioned above) overrides any PropertyGroup settings in publish profile *.pubxml files, as described in this blog post.
What I have found is that the continuous deployment process for Azure/TFVC works by having an InitializeContinuousDeployment build activity in the TfvcContinuousDeploymentTemplate.12.xaml build template, immediately before the RunMSBuild activity. This takes the MSbuild arguments you specify in the build definition, and appends to them the ones needed to deploy to Azure. Unfortunately, this is mostly hard-coded, and that means it always specifies a single deployment path for all web projects in the solution. You can't deploy each web app to a different location using publish profiles alone.
So one workaround option is to add something like a BeforeBuild MSBuild target to each project, to override the command line value of DeployIisAppPath. The problem with this is that the path specified in the publish profile, and seen in the publish wizard, will no longer be the path actually being used for deployment.
So the solution I went with is marginally better; it is what we would describe in New Zealand as "huckery".
Basically I added an InvokeMethod build activity between the InitializeContinuousDeployment and RunMSBuild activities. The arguments for this activity are as follows:
DisplayName:
Configure build for using publish profiles (removes DeployIisAppPath MSBuild parameter)
GenericTypeArguments:
System.String
MethodName:
SetValue
TargetObject:
AdvancedBuildSettings
Parameters:
Direction: Type: Value
In String "MSBuildArguments"
In String String.Join(" ", AdvancedBuildSettings.GetValue(Of String)("MSBuildArguments", String.Empty).Split(New String() {" "}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries).Where(Function(s) Not s.StartsWith("/p:DeployIisAppPath=")))
What this does is removes the DeployIisAppPath argument from the MSBuild command line arguments list completely, so that it doesn't override this same property in the publish profiles. Instead of the messing around with splitting and joining the string, it would be slightly nicer if you could just append /p:DeployIisAppPath="" to the command line, but this just sets the property to an empty string and you get an error:
"ConcatFullServiceUrlWithSiteName" task was not given a value for the
required parameter "SiteAppName"
So like I said, pretty huckery, but it's a solution that allows you to have continuous deployment of multiple web projects to Azure with a minimal amount of changes to the default setup.
You can override the deployment engine in Kudu by using the Azure CLI Tools. Running the azure site deploymentscript command and passing in the parameters for one of your projects -s <solutionFile> --aspWAP <projectFilePath>.
This will create a .deployment file and a deploy.cmd (or deploy.sh if you pass the -t bash parameter) modifying the deploy.cmd to add build/deploy steps for the second project.
More information is on deployment hooks is available in the project kudu wiki.
EDIT
You can use App Setting COMMAND to add a deployment script to your site.
When configuration the build definition, I have the option of copying the build output to the server:
We are using the VSO Host Build Controller and Azure's Continuous Integration build template to release to our development environment after every check-in.
Is there any reason why we need to have this value set? How could it ever be useful?
The Copy build output to the server will put the output of the build as a zip file attached the build that can be downloaded later.
In a situation where you don't care about the build output because you have it setup to continuously deploy to Azure (or some other build based deployment) you would not use this option.
If you however needed to download the output, for example a Windows Store App that you need to publish to the Store manually, then you could use this to get the application.
In VSO you most likely don't have a Drop Server (unless you have invested in Azure heavily) so you have 2 choices:
Put them in source control. Only in TFVC, not Git. Also fills up your Repo with Large Files.
Attach them to the build as a Zip.
The second scenario is exactly where you would use this.
I am trying to build and Deploy our solution to Azure using TeamCity.
When I Build the azure solution (Web.Azure.ccproj) using TC, it always generates wrong file like Web.Azure.ccproj.cspkg in Release\app.publish folder. I am not understaing why it is generating a file like ccproj.cspkg. Rather it should have just generated Web.Azure.cspkg.
Note: when I try directly in command prompt (msbuild Web.Azure.ccproj /t:Publish) am able to see proper files generated.
Any reason why this is happening?
Thanks in Advance
I don't know why the generated files are different. However, if you are looking to deploy to Azure Cloud Services from TeamCity, maybe this link will help.
The linked post has a powershell script that will deploy the solution and you can include that as a build step in TeamCity. The script deals with having different Live and UAT environments etc, which you may not need.
For what it's worth, we're building the entire solution with a Visual Studio (.sln) runner and it builds the Azure projects fine.
Some of our parameters:
Targets: Rebuild
Configuration: Dev (Could be Stage or Release per our environments)
Command line parameters: /p:TargetProfile=Dev /P:Configuration=Dev
The last set of parameters are where I originally got stuck. We have profiles for Azure projects and configurations for the entire solution. We need both to get the right packages created.