I am looking for some help to understand how to use Azure DevOps to deploy the application I am working on to a Windows VM.
Currently process: Our code is currently in Azure Git repo and we have two QA servers, the QA servers have been setup already. Every time we go to QA server to manually pull the lastest code with command line git pull command. Then run a web page to upgrade/downgrade database if database script has been updated.
Goal: Would use Azure DevOps to automate the process.
Here is what I would know:
1) With Azure DevOps, when deploying the code to QA server, could we only copy over the changed files? The software package is pretty big, it would take long time to copy the whole thing.
2) How Azure DevOps move files to QA server, does it use Git pull or file copy?
3) When using Azure DevOps tools, could we trigger a http(s) request?
4) Is there any tool I could check if Git repo has updates?
5) Is there any tool support if/else logic, because we would trigger the http(s) request only if Git repo has changes.
Just would get an overall idea.
as far as I know there is no layering\caching.
how would it use git pull to download from a web server? its using http request to download the package
not sure I understand the question, but you can have a script step in the deployment and do whatever you like (ie http(s) request)
this question doesnt make sense, you can use git command line, but I dont understand how that ties to the release process. you should build your code on commit and create a package that you would later consume in the release process
read 3 and 4.
Related
We use Azure Pipelines for our CI/CD processes since a few weeks. The CI pipeline gets code from GitHub, builds, tests and creates a deploy package.
From the beginning I am quite certain that every commit got detected as intended, but recently that is not the case. Manual triggers and scheduled triggers work, but continuous integration does not.
What could be the causes for this?
In the pipeline, we checked the box for "continuous integration", and we use the recommended GitHup App to provide authorization. This is verified to work, we can see the authorized GitHub repos in the pipelines settings.
You can check if the github branch you committed to is included in the Branch filters. If it is not included. Click Add to add the branch.
Check if there is skip CI command(eg.[skip ci]) in commit message. See here for more information.
If CI trigger is not working even all the settings are correct. You can try below workarounds:
1,Disable the CI trigger, save, then re-enable it and save it again.
2,Clone your build definition. See below screenshot
3, Create a new build pipeline with the same trigger and settings.
If all above arenot working. You can go to this site to see if there is a server outage of azure devops.
We ended up changing how we connect from Azure Pipelines to GitHub. The recommended way is to install the Azure App in GitHub and connect using that in Pipelines. My experience is that it worked at first, but stopped working. I read somewhere that only the first connection works with webhooks, so maybe we tried it somewhere else or something that broke it. I ended up using a GitHub servic account to pull and listen for webhooks, and that works just as expected.
To keep it short and sweet I am attempting to automate my CI/CD process which includes a AzureDevOps build running automatically when code is pushed in a bitbucket server repo. I have not found any documentation on how to set this up. Does anyone have any experience with this process? Keep in mind (even though i've mentioned it) I am using the server version of Bitbucket while using the PAAS version of AzureDevops.
It's fairly straightforward. When you create a pipeline, it will ask you where your repo is.
If it's hosted by Atlassian (you access it by https://bitbucket.org), select the BitBucket Cloud one and provide your login.
If it's self hosted, select "Other Git".
I'd like to execute a command line app that I created as part of my CI builds.
The command line app is not related to the repository on which the build is running. (Basically, its a tool that is supposed to send some project related metadata to a company web application to gather some metrics).
It seems I can execute it using a Command Line task, as explained here:
How to execute exe in VSTS Release pipeline empty process
The question is, however - how do I upload my custom tool into Azure Devops?
I know it's possible to create custom tasks (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/extend/develop/add-build-task?view=azure-devops) , but it seems quite a lot of effort to create, especially given that I have a console tool that is doing what I need.
I do this by including a seperate deployment folder in the git repo with my source code. This folder contains all the extra stuff (exe's) that I need to call to deploy.
You could if you wanted keep these artifacts in a different repo and/or different artifact if you wish as you can get any number of different artifacts
Then I include the deployment folder when publishing artifacts. In your build step you pull down the artifacts and it includes your EXE.
You're meant to be able to use things like NPM to install helper libraries on the fly but none of my required libraries were ever supported.
You can also use a self hosted agent which is your own host (Often an Azure VM). You install everything you need on there then you install a DevOps self hosted agent which lets build pipelines use it.
Create a build of your exe
Upload your exe to blob storage.
Create a SAS token to access your blob.
In your build create a task with a PowerShell script. In the PS script download your exe (unzip), and copy it to Build.StagingDirectory/"yourToolFolder". Then in your PS script run it. You probably want to pass it arguments like the location of the repo on the build agent.
A way to achieve this involve create a deployment group and add a server to the group where you have access and privileges to upload your console. it could be onprem or cloud depends in your requirements.
I created a simple .net core console app. This app's repository is a Azure DevOps one. I have also created a ubuntu vm which i can successfully connect to, to receive the deploy.
I have managed to deploy my app from my local computer, by cloning, building and pushing it (via scp command).
Now I would like to do this using azure devops pipeline?
I managed to build the app, but now i can't seem to find help regarding how to execute the scp (or a alternative) command...
Edit1:
Ok, this is turning out to be an order of magnitude harder than I expected. I'm giving up for now. I've been trying to figure this out for almost 2 work-days. I can't believe that a task that requires 4-6 commands on a script on my local machine should require this much effort to do on a devops environment...
You can configure a deploy agent to your VM and use a release management to copy and configure your applications:
Deploy an agent on Linux
Define your multi-stage continuous deployment (CD) pipeline
Have a look at the Copy files over SSH pipeline task which supports SCP.
I am developing CD release pipeline using TFS 2015 update 2 on-prem instance. I'm relying on ARM template to setup Azure website and Azure Sql server. I'm using FTP method for deploying website bits from internal Build server to Azure website. For this website deployment I'm reading the credentials from PublsihingProfile of the newly created website.
Is this a right way or can you suggest a better way? Any comments are appreciated.
P.S. Customer wants to use FTP method and not WebDeploy.
If you really have to use FTP, and the thing you're not happy with is the process/password secret management, you could try this:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=januskamphansen.ftpupload-task
Its a VSTS extension task for release, which works with the vnext build/release system in VSTS or TFS2015 server. This task lets you put the parameters in against each environment you setup, and mark the passwords as secrets so they wont come out in logs or the UI.
The step basically wraps up the process of doing the ftp bit for you - you may want to do other steps as part of the release.