We have wsps in our project.But whenever wsp is deployed the "Service Unavailable" page comes at the site level.
Is there any way that few Dlls can be added in GAC without taking a downtime in production server?
No is the answer in reality. When you do a deployment with a WSP the reset is triggered so the latest dll's are reloaded and to clear down memory within the application pools.
So anything that is related to server side code will require a reset.
If you update anything in the hive you can get away with zero downtime deployment.
There is a more in depth answer here as to when do you need an IISReset
Cheers
Truez
It is technically possible to do a local deployment and stage this yourself. Install-SPSolution offers the local switch. You could in theory use this and control the rotation of the deployment (assuming more than one server). but as noted above to get IIS to reload the assemblies requires the application pool to be cycled. Assemblies are loaded from GAC, but are then memory resident.
https://blog.ithinksharepoint.com/2012/07/16/deploying-sharepoint-wsp-solutions-without-downtime/
I've tried it a few times and not been hugely successful so your mileage may vary.
If you are dependent on GACed Assemblies you can technically push them yourself outside of the WSP. However you may end up in a weird place as the following may occur:
1) You retract the web application from all servers (this will also retract the solution). You may end up with nothing or orphaned assemblies in GAC
2) You add a server later on and it takes the deployment package and you have a server with a different set of bits in your farm. This is painful to troubleshoot for anyone. Imagine if you left?
3) You deploy an assembly and it has a different version than what your web.config expects and it can't be used or found.
Related
I have a web application project in VS2012 which I'm publishing using a "Web Deploy Package". I want this package to include app-pool settings, specifically creating an IIS app-pool and assigning the newly created application to it.
I'm familiar with the option "Include application pool settings used by this Web project" available when the project is configured to use an IIS instance (not IIS Express), but IIS configuration is not part of the project file, and thus not source controlled. What happens when somebody builds a deployment package on a machine that hasn't had IIS meticulously configured? Not ideal.
How else then, can I go about getting AppPool settings into my web deploy package? I understand that the appPoolConfig provider is IIS7+ only, I'm fine with that limitation. I've banged my head against this issue in the past and never found a solution. 18 months later, we've got a new VisualStudio version, and a new web-publishing-pipeline, are there new options to address this? Or maybe something I missed when I first tackled this problem?
Edit
OK, I'm seeing the following as options:
Configure my project to sync settings from an IIS instance. As mentioned, I'm not a fan of this given that it puts settings outside of the project, meaning the environment has to be meticulously configured to build + publish. Plus it drags along other IIS settings I don't want included.
Inject something into the web-publishing-pipeline (WPP) to modify the archive.xml. I've toyed with this in the past and had limited success. One problem is the pipeline isn't exactly co-operative with working directly on the archive.xml file, another problem is some of the more cryptic attributes involved, like MSDeploy.MSDeployProviderOptions which appears to have some Base64 encoded binary? No idea what to put in there.
Find an existing "provider" that can do what I want. I might be out of luck here, the appPoolConfig provider only seems to want to read / write IIS, not, say, an XML file of settings. Does anybody know otherwise?
Write my own "provider" to produce manifest output entries. I'm not sure, is it possible to write a custom provider that writes to a manifest using the name of an existing provider? As in, MyCustomPoolProvider writes appPoolConfig sections into a manifest? This sounds like a potentially painful exercise that may or may not work. Would I still need to figure out the encoding of whatever is going into MSDeploy.MSDeployProviderOptions?
I get the feeling that the fundamental obstacle with Web Deploy for what I'm trying to accomplish, is how strictly it leans on "providers". The pre-existing providers are largely designed for IIS synchronisation, not primary development and publication. It so happens that some of these providers can be relatively easily hooked into via MSBuild, but the majority insist on pulling data from IIS, and that's that.
You are correct in your understanding of the appPoolConfig provider, in that it can only sync between App Pools and can't be provided with the configuration directly. What you could potentially do is keep a copy of the appPool in question in package form (ie. msdeploy -verb:sync -source:appPoolConfig=PoolName -dest:package=apppool.zip) and attempt to hijack the pipeline so that the MSDeploy call adds the application content into the package, leaving the existing content there.
Alternatively, you could always keep the packages separate and deploy them with different calls to MSDeploy.
FYI, MSDeploy.MSDeployProviderOptions is simply an encoded version of the parameters supplied to the provider when it was packaged. For example, -source:dirPath=c:\,ignoreErrors=0x10293847 -dest:package=package.zip would package the ignoreErrors value.
I have a ps1 script that deploys all of my webparts. I started noticing an error (Error 503 service unavailable) after running Update-SPSolution. What is happening is that when I upgrade all my webparts, the application pools for all SharePoint web applications stop. It also takes about 12 minutes per web part to deploy (which seems like forever - it looks like it may be running them all in parallel). Could someone shed some light as to what the best way is to upgrade web parts using Update-SPSolution. Optimally, I would like my script to stop while it fully completes an upgrade on a particular web part, and then move on the next one when it is finished. Thoughts?
You might get better performance on the upgrade if you set ResetWebServer to false in each solution manifest. Naturally, you would be compelled to reset the web server(s) after all the upgrades, but at least you would only be required to do it once.
You might also consider combining web parts into fewer projects/solutions. This can be challenging, as your web parts' assembly-qualified names are part of the .webpart file, and therefore part of any web part that is still in use.
If your solutions are Farm solutions, SharePoint will restart the application pool in order to reload your assemblies.
The only way to completely remove this restart is to use Sandbox solution. That's not always possible, but depending on your type of customization this may be an answer.
Another solution is to only have one solution containing all your webparts. You'll still need an application pool restart, but it should take less than a minute.
12min is really a lot!
Edit:
To merge your WSPs, you'll have to merge your Visual Studio projects into one. It's also possible to do it by hand, but it's not a good choice in the long term.
I feel like I need a better defined framework for updating my SharePoint (MOSS 2007) application with custom code changes. I am creating wsp solution files with features and new types and such, but once those get tested and deployed, I feel like it's a bit of a leap of faith, and that makes me nervous and occasionally reluctant to deploy changes. After deployment, it's difficult to correlate the current state of the SharePoint application with the specific code that is deployed on that SharePoint server. What features are actually installed and on which sites? Which features are activated or deactivated? Which version of this custom field or content type is really there? Things like this. If an error crops up, I have to rely on my assumptions about what code is there and actually running, or I have to spend time digging through deployed assemblies and the 12 hive -- not impossible, but pretty unpleasant.
What steps should I take to improve my ability to unambiguously determine the state of the application and find the code that truly represents that state? Are there third-party tools that can help with this?
I feel your pain... Application Developyment Lifecycle with SharePoint 2007 leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
To answer your question. We built our own deployment utility that does a few things for us.
Checks state of key Timer Jobs (too many times we would do a deployment to find one WFE that did not get deployment)
Checks state of key Services on all our web front ends (again we want to know health of farm before we start kicking off timer jobs).
Shows file version and date of selected assemblies from GAC (does this across all Web Front Ends). We have seen problems before where assemblies did not get installed correctly across the farms.
Updates web.config settings based on an custom XML scheme we provide. We ran into some problems with web.config updates so we have thought about creating a utility to validate the web.config (specifically make sure there are no duplicate entries for specific keys).
Push content type updates (first time content types are deployed via feature it works great, but as soon as you need to update that content type it gets tough).
Checks status of WSP package after deployment or upgrade.
This utility uses the SharePoint API to do most of this work. Some of it is done by checking WMI Events.
Unfortunately the SharePoint development experience is lacking in this regard. As long as you are "namespacing" all features deployed using solution packages, you can use solution management from central admin to keep track of versions, and what gets deployed to which site collection.
Features are scoped from all levels from the farm to an individual web; so maintenence from that level is a little tough. I just try to organize all deployed code from the (top down) solution level.
It gets even more complicated when deploying custom timer jobs, event handlers, etc; I really hope that version next will address a lot of these common developer concerns.
Isn't the only way that you have a planned/controlled deployment process and a version management system like TFS
In the current project I am involved in we have:
Continuous builds
Daily Builds on a development server
When we release something to test we merge the code to the Main bransch in the version management system (TFS)
When tested and ready for production then we merge the main bransch to the release bransch
Using this structured way we always knows what is deployed in what environment and can also track all changes based on environment or changes in requirements(are also tracked in TFS)
So I figured out that by adding the ResetWebServer="FALSE" attribute to the solution manifest prevents SharePoint from recycling any app pools.
However, when upgrading a solution that originally did not specify ResetWebServer="FALSE" or when retracting a solution that does specify ResetWebServer="FALSE", the application pools are still being recycled. Is there a way to prevent any auto-recycling of app pools?
This does not seem possible given the document on MSDN (see below), note that I included Deploying a Solution over Upgrading a solution as underneath it is effectively doing a file replacement. I believe the restart/recycling is necessary as a result of how IIS functions. An option to explore if you wanted to manage when this occurs is to ensure that all deployments are done via timer jobs and execute when their impact will be minimized.
Deploying a solution
Initially, manifest and feature manifests are parsed to find assembly and _layouts files, which are copied to the appropriate locations. All other files contained within a feature directory are copied to the feature directory. After solution files are copied to the target computers, a configuration reset is scheduled for all front-end Web servers; the reset then deploys the files and restarts Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS).
Retracting a solution
On each front-end Web server, the following occurs:
Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is disabled.
Files are removed from the system.
IIS is re-enabled and Windows SharePoint Services is reloaded when
a user browses to a page.
You might also take a look at the "-local" switch. Didn't try it yet but it seemed that it allowed deployment server per server when you are in a load balanced situation.
Might be a good lead.
I'm trying to re-install a DLL in the GAC, everything seems to work fine but the web application accessing it still seems to be using the old one.
The old DLL is the same version as the new one with only a minor edit, it will be used by 50 different sites so changing the version then changing the reference in the web.config is not a good solution.
Restarting the IIS server or the worker process isn't an option as there are already 50 sites running that must continue to do so.
does anyone know what i'm doing wrong or what i can do to remedy this situation?
AFAIK, you need to restart IIS for it to get a fresh reference to the updated DLL. Your best bet is to perform the reset at a low traffic time. If you are running multiple servers with load balancing, you can prevent new connections from hitting one server until all connections have been closed. Afterwards, update the DLL, restart IIS, and bring the server back into the connection pool. Repeat for each server with no visible downtime to the end users.
Since you don't make a reference to application pools, I'm going to assume you are on the old version of IIS. In that case, what you'll need to do is to "touch" all the DLLs in each site that references the DLL.
The problem is that the code is already loaded and you need to find a non-intrusive way to re-load the application. Recycling app-pools is an effective way to do this. If you are on the old IIS that doesn't have app-pools, then updating the last-modified in the /bin/ folders or web.config files will reload the application without affecting the other sites.
So a script of some kind to do the above is in order. All it needs to do is update the lastmodified on the DLLs in every /bin application directory.