I'm using Visual Studio Online for my TFS needs, and I have a pretty big solution which contains several web projects.
How can I set up automatic deployment of a specific project in the solution to a specific website on Azure?
The default workflow used to deploy in VSO does not seem to handle this scenario.
The "first" web project found within the solution is chosen for deployment according to this discussion. Note that the discussion relates to git on VSO but it seems to hold true for builds using the VSO CI workflow.
According to the discussion changing the project names to influence the ordering should/might work but results seem mixed.
We chose to add a second solution only containing the web-project to deploy, its dependencies and tests. This will not work if there are dependencies on other web-projects.
Also take not of this article on a configuration-based approach, a question that this one might be a duplicate of or a question concerning actual deployment of multiple projects into one site.
Related
We have multiple small projects within our organization. Ever since we adopted Azure DevOps recently, we started creating the individual Azure DevOps projects for everyone of these projects. The ALM process has been going on very well, with end to end traceability established with in the online tool.
However, as we get to end of each of these projects, we started to realize that these individual project and its code needs to be maintained further for the bug fixes and hotfixes. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't give a clear road-map for a project code, once it is completed.
Since we have a separate devops project for all the maintenance applications, this becomes much more confusing.
So, Could you suggest me on what is the best practice to maintain the code after the project is completed? Here are some options that I can think of.
Just keep the code in the same project and keep doing the bug fixes there. But, this will create an administrative nightmare to keep track of multiple projects for our maintenance application landscape (especially, since we already have a single projects with multiple repos and teams maintained).
Migrate the code from the completed project repository to the maintenance project. But, this again is a migration from one repo to another. So, I am not sure if this is right.
We have multiple repos and whenever the developer runs the sonarQube scanner through Jenkins job, it is creating one project with build number along with the date, is there anyway I can re-use the same project name ..?
developers are running sonarQube reports through Jenkins jobs.
sonar.projectKey=portal1-sonar:1stiteration-${BUILD_NUMBER}
sonar.projectName=SonarQube nodeJS portal1 Build : ${BUILD_NUMBER}_${BUILD_TIMESTAMP}
anyway, I can change and use same project name, whenever developer runs sonarQube.
every project is defined in SonarQube with it's own key. That means if the key is the same, it is the same Project, and you will have a "history" of analyses and can compare parameters.
Although the idea of buildnumbers seems to be interesting, i recommend to use Branch names instead. There are currently two ways of doing this, for the first one, you need to have a SonarQube installation with a paid price. Than you are entitled to use the branch plugin. Which is actually the more superior way, because your project will show branches. The sonarQube docs are quiet helpful regarding this.
The old/Deprecated way will create a new project per branch, which you can than compare. the property you need to set is sonar.branch and this will be automatically added to your project key. So if the project key is Project and the sonar.branch is set to develop your new project will have the key Project:develop. This parameter is deprecated, and i am not sure, how long it will stay in the system.
We have currently released our code to Production, and as a result have cut and branched to ensure we can support our current release, whilst still supporting hot-fixes without breaking the current release from any on-going development.
Here is our current structure:
Project-
/Development
/RC1
Until recently using Octopus we have had the following process:
Dev->Staging/Dev Test->UAT
Which works fine as we didn't have an actual release.
My question is how can Octopus support our new way of working?
Do we create a new/clone project in Octopus named RC1 and have CI from our RC1 branch into that? Then add/remove as appropriate as this RC's are no longer required?
Or is there another method that we've clearly missed out on?
It seems that most organisations that are striving for continuous something end up with a CI server and continuous deployment up to some manual sign off environment and then require continuous delivery to production. This generally leads to a branching strategy in order to isolate the release candidate to allow hot fixing.
I think a question like this raises more points for discussion, before trying to provide a one size fits all answer IMHO.
The kind of things that spring to mind are:
Do you have "source code" dependencies or binary ones for any shared components.
What level of integration / automated regression testing do you have.
Is your deployment orchestrated by TFS, or driven by a user in Octopus.
Is there a database as part of the application that needs consideration.
How is your application version numbering controlled.
What is your release cycle.
In the past where I've encountered this scenario, I would look towards a code promotion branching strategy which provides you with one branch to maintain in production - This has worked well where continuous deployment to production is not an option. You can find more branching strategies discussed on the ALM Rangers page on CodePlex
Developers / Testers can continually push code / features / bug fixes through staging / uat. At the point of release the Dev branch is merged to Release branch, which causes a release build and creates a nuget package. This should still be released to Octopus in exactly the same way, only it's a brand new release and not a promotion of a previous release. This would need to ensure that there is no clash on version numbering and so a strategy might be to have a difference in the major number - This would depend on your current setup. This does however, take an opinionated view that the deployment is orchestrated by the build server rather than Octopus Deploy. Primarily TeamCity / TFS calls out to the Ocotpus API, rather than a user choosing the build number in Octopus (we have been known to make mistakes)
ocoto.exe create-release --version GENERATED_BY_BUILD_SERVER
To me, the biggest question I ask clients is "What's the constraint that means you can't continuously deploy to production". Address that constraint (see theory of constraints) and you remove the need to work round an issue that needn't be there in the first place (not always that straight forward I know)
I would strongly advise that you don't clone projects in Octopus for different environments as it's counter intuitive. At the end of the day you're just telling Octopus to go and get this nuget package version for this app, and deploy it to this environment please. If you want to get the package from a different NuGet feed for release, then you could always make use of the custom binding on the NuGet field in Octopus and drive that by a scoped variable depending on the environment you're deploying to.
Step 1 - Setup two feeds
Step 2 - Scope some variables for those feeds
Step 3 - Consume the feed using a custom expression
I hope this helps
This is unfortunately something Octopus doesn't directly have - true support for branching (yet). It's on their roadmap for 3.1 under better branching support. They have been talking about this problem for some time now.
One idea that you mentioned would be to clone your project for each branch. You can do this under the "Settings" tab (on the right-hand side) in your project that you want to clone. This will allow you to duplicate your project and simply rename it to one of your branches - so one PreRelease or Release Candidate project and other is your mainline Dev (I would keep the same name of the project). I'm assuming you have everything in the same project group.
Alternatively you could just change your NuSpec files in your projects in different branches so that you could clearly see what's being deployed at the overview project page or on the dashboard. So for your RC branch, you could just add the suffix -release within the NuSpec in your RC branch which is legal (rules on Semantic Versioning talk about prereleases at rule #9). This way, you can use the same project but have different packages to deploy. If your targeted servers are the same, then this may be the "lighter" or simpler approach compared to cloning.
I blogged about how we do this here:
http://www.alexjamesbrown.com/blog/development/working-branch-deployments-tfs-octopus/
It's a bit of a hack, but in summary:
Create branch in TFS Create branch specific build definition
Create branch specific drop location for Octopack
Create branch specific Octopus Deployment Project (by cloning your ‘main’ deployment
Edit the newly cloned deployment, re-point the nuget feed location to your
branch specific output location, created in step 3
I'm trying to set up a build definition for a solution that has multiple web projects in it, but I want a specific one to be deployed as a result of a build (as far as I understand it takes the first web project). I know that there has been discussions around that issue but these discussions are quite old now. I wonder if there is still no solution.
Take a look at customizing deployments using a .deployment file
Basically to achieve what you want you would need to create a .deployment file in the root of your repo that contains something like the following
[config]
project = MyOtherWebProject/MyOtherWebProject.csproj
I have a Visual Studio 2012 solution containing a Windows service project and a web application project.
I want Team City (version 8.0.3) to create two zip files (one for the service and one for the web app) that I will deploy manually.
Should I create a build step to build the entire solution, followed by a build step to publish the Windows service and a build step to publish the web site (via publish profiles). Then use Artifact paths in General Settings to zip up these two published folders?
Or should I have just one build step to build the solution and then use the Artifact paths to create the two zip files?
Or is there a better way than either of the above?
You have to ask yourself if these two projects are linked and in which manner they should be built together.
My feeling is : if your projects are in the same solution, they are linked in some ways and have to be built together.
Then, you should build your solution (sln) and not projects (*proj).
Application organization
Generally, your build server should not redefine -too much- the way your applications are organized. You should always use your plateform application descriptor to build your applications.
In case of .NET and Visual Studio, the application descriptor is your solution (sln). It defines the needs and how your application have to be built.
If your project have to be built separately, they should be in differents solution unless you prefer to create specific solution configuration (in addition to Release & Debug).
Anyway, the solution is still the build entry point.
TeamCity
Speaking about TeamCity, different and standalone applications should be in separate build configurations.
The pure build (code compilation) should be in one build step and you should not use too much code compilation runners in one build configuration.
Your build configurations should reflect your applications farm logic.
If you need to link them in some ways which are related to packaging for example, you can link your build configurations through snapshot or artifact dependency.