I dropped my hard drive which contained all my code and now it won't plug in to my computer. I need the code to my Azure website which I deployed earlier asap. Is there a way for me to access this code?
Yes, there are multiple ways.
Using the deployment credentials you can connect via FTP and download the files.
Using Git source control you can add your azure web app as a remote reference and clone it locally.
It's not going to be pretty but once you get your binaries via FTP you can use a Reflector library to decompile your binaries and generate source code from them.
It won't be as good as the original source code, but it'll be functionally equivalent and will make it easier for you get back to where you were.
Related
I messed up. I needed to reset my computer and wipe it clean. In doing so, I mistakenly committed incorrect code (a lot of it) to source control. Now, going to retrieve it and discovering its the wrong stuff. I have the correct code published - Is it at all possible to get this code that's up in Azure?
You can download a copy of the deployed code via the KUDU interface. Please note that this is the deployed code, and it won't be the source if you are using a compiled language such as C#.
Please see this blog for details on how to access the KUDU interface. If you click on debug console and then powershell, you will see a file browser (picture shown at bottom of blog post). There is a download button for each folder. Simply navigate to where your files are stored and download.
Yup. Assuming you want the repo not the deployed (compiled) code- Go into Kudu/DebugConsole and grab the repository folder from /site/.
It has a clone of your local git repo in it.
There are so many plugins available which will help push to a webserver, but are there any that will download?
A Bit of Background
I'd like to automate the process of publishing my CMS-based website. The only issue is that our marketing people regularly blog and make content changes, so I'd like to first download the content files which have changed to my local development environment (.md files, which are not accessible from the web) before I push everything up to the staging server.
Does anything like this exist? I've searched NPM quite thoroughly, as well as this question which unfortunately didn't yield any results.
I did see a pretty robust cURL based plugin, however it doesn't support FTP authentication and since these files are not web-accessible directly, I'll need to leverage FTP.
A quick google search gave me this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/grunt-ftp
For a project I am currently working on, I need to create a setup application for an existing desktop application. The setup application will be downloaded from a website, and will download required files to the correct locations. When the application is started, it will look for newer versions of these files, download them if any exist, then start the application.
I am using Visual Studio Online with TFVC, linked to Azure. I have a test application set up so that when I trigger a build, Release Management finds the build directory, and moves the files to Azure Blob Storage, but prepends a GUID to the file names being transferred. So what I have in my storage container is:
{Some GUID}/2390/Test.exe
{Some GUID}/2389/Test.exe
{Some GUID}/2387/Test.exe
...
What I want in my container is the latest version of Test.exe, so I can connect to the container, and determine whether I want to download or not.
I have put together a NullSoft installer that checks a website, and downloads files. I have also written a NullSoft "launcher" that will compare local file versions with versions on the website (using a version xml file on the website), and download if newer, then launch the application. What I need to figure out is how to get the newer files to the website after a build, with automation being one of the goals.
I am an intern, and new to deployment in general, and I don't even know if I'm going about this the right way.
Questions:
Does what I am doing make sense for what I am trying to accomplish?
We are trying to emulate ClickOnce functionality, but can't use ClickOnce due to the fact that the application dynamically loads a number of DLLs. Is there a way to configure ClickOnce to include non-referenced DLLs?
Is there a best practice for doing what I'm describing?
I appreciate any advice, links to references, or real-world examples.
You are mentioning ClickOnce, which you investigated but can't use. Have you already tried an alternative: Squirrel? With Squirrel you can specify which files should be part of the installation, allowing you to explicitly specify which files to include even if you load them dynamically.
Link: https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows
Squirrel is a full framework for creating an auto-update application and can work with Azure Blob Storage hosting (and also CDN if you need to scale up)
I was thinking to use dropbox to upload my source code of a web-application. For this folder i would create a shared link. This link i like to use to download all the latest source files on my test server (instead of using s/FTP).
Now i know you can use dropbox with linux by installing their version, but it requires to create account. I don't want to use a account, and for sure don't want to use my own account.
Is there anyway to use a shared (folder) link, and download all the files in that folder command-line, without a account (maybe something like wget) ? There is no need for live-syncing, it would be fine to trigger the download with some bash script.
Thanks.
If you're ok with your links being public (which i think is not a good idea) , then you can just create a file with a list of links to your files and then create a bash script to loop over each line of the file get the link with wget
If you want to use authentication, you'll have to register for a Dropbox API key and then create a script (in python,ruby or java etc) to authenticate and get the files.
If you don't have a specific need for dropbox, i'll recommend you use git (or similar). With git you'll just have to create the repository on your server and clone it on your desktop. Then you can just edit your files and push it to the server.... it's so much easier.
Rogier, github has become the norm for hosting code. There are other options (Sourceforge, Google Code, Beanstalk) or you can set up a private git repository on your own computer.
Somewhere deep in my browser history there's an article about how to do that.
However a little googling turned up http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652414. Let me know if you can't find some satisfactory instructions on your own of how to set up a git repo on your computer.
I'm looking for something that can copy (preferably only changed) files from a development machine to a staging machine and finally to a set of production machines.
A "what if" mode would be nice as would the capability to "rollback" the last deployment. Database migrations aren't a necessary feature.
UPDATE: A free/low-cost tool would be great, but cost isn't the only concern. A tool that could actually manage deployment from one environment to the next (dev->staging->production instead of from a development machine to each environment) would also be ideal.
The other big nice-to-have is the ability to only copy changed files - some of our older sites contain hundreds of .asp files.
#Sean Carpenter can you tell us a little more about your environment? Should the solution be free? simple?
I find robocopy to be pretty slick for this sort of thing. Wrap in up in a batch file and you are good to go. It's a glorified xcopy, but deploying my website isn't really hard. Just copy out the files.
As far as rollbacks... You are using source control right? Just pull the old source out of there. Or, in your batch file, ALSO copy the deployment to another folder called website yyyy.mm.dd so you have a lovely folder ready to go in an emergency.
look at the for command for details on how to get the parts of the date.
robocopy.exe
for /?
Yeah, it's a total "hack" but it moves the files nicely.
For some scenarios I used a freeware product called SyncBack (Download here).
It provides complex, multi-step file synchronization (filesystem or FTP etc., compression etc.). The program has a nice graphical user interface. You can define profiles and group/execute them together.
You can set filter on file types, names etc. and execute commands/programs after the job execution. There is also a job log provided as html report, which can be sent as email to you if you schedule the job.
There is also a professional version of the software, but for common tasks the freeware should do fine.
You don't specify if you are using Visual Studio .NET, but there are a few built-in tools in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008:
Copy Website tool -- basically a visual synchronization tool, it highlights files and lets you copy from one to the other. Manual, built into Visual Studio.
aspnet_compiler.exe -- lets you precompile websites.
Of course you can create a web deployment package and deploy as an MSI as well.
I have used a combination of Cruise Control.NET, nant and MSBuild to compile, and swap out configuration files for specific environments and copy the files to a build output directory. Then we had another nant script to do the file copying (and run database scripts if necessary).
For a rollback, we would save all prior deployments, so theoretically rolling back just involved redeploying the last working build (and restoring the database).
We used UnleashIt (unfortunate name I know) which was nicely customizable and allowed you to save profiles for deploying to different servers. It also has a "backup" feature which will backup your production files before deployment so rollback should be pretty easy.
I've given up trying to find a good free product that works.
I then found Microsoft's Sync Toy 2.0 which while lacking in options works well.
BUT I need to deploy to a remote server.
Since I connect with terminal services I realized I can select my local hard drive when I connect and then in explorer on the remote server i can open \\tsclient\S\MyWebsite on the remote server.
I then use synctoy with that path and synchronize it with my server. Seems to work pretty well and fast so far...
Maybe rsync plus some custom scripts will do the trick.
Try repliweb. It handles full rollback to previous versions of files. I've used it whilst working for a client who demanded its use and I;ve become a big fan of it, partiularily:
Rollback to previous versions of code
Authentication and rules for different user roles
Deploy to multiple environments
Full reporting to the user via email / logs statiing what has changed, what the current version is etc.