I am trying to create automated build to publish a folder with files onto Azure web-site. And I cannot accomplish this.
I am NOT publishing a solution (.sln), but rather a folder with files. I am using VS2013 and Visual Studio Online.
I have experience with TFS web publishing, so I published solutions many times.
So, what I did so far:
Created an MSBuild build.xml file that just copies files from the folder to the output.
Created a build definition based on AzureContinuousDeployment.11.xaml
Specified build.xml in my build definition, Process tab, in "Solution to build" parameter:
If I build my project, it is correctly built, files are copied to the output, etc (I can verify it by opening drop location, all files are there).
Then, I:
Created a web-site in Azure, linked it to my TFS subscription.
Downloaded a publish profile (.PublishSettings from a web-site).
Created a Web publish profile (.pubxml) in Visual Studio based on .PublishSettings file).
Specified Web Deploy Publish Profile and Deployment Settings Name:
But now I am getting an error during build:
Exception Message: Please specify a Visual Studio Solution (.sln) to build. (type BuildFromSolutionException)
So it asks me for a Visual Studio solution, but earlier it worked perfectly with MSBuild file (after step 3).
I tried to rename my .xml to .sln (probably it is not what I should have done), and build now says "There was no Windows Azure project (.ccproj) detected in the solution. Continuous delivery to an Azure Cloud Service requires an Azure project. (type CCProjNotFoundException)"
If I don't specify "Deployment Settings Name", build completes without errors, but again no publishing to Azure.
So, the question is, how to publish a custom MSBuild build, without a solution, onto Azure? Is TFS continuous Azure publishing for Solutions only? I expect it to be agile, like I published folders from Local Git to Web-site without any hassle.
What should I do?
There are a few confused ideas in your question. Fits, there is no relationship between and automated build and Git. You are using Team Foundation Build to run the workflow of deployment. It is the workflow that is not working for you. In effect the build and deployment script. In fact the script you are using works with both Git and TFVC so that is not the issue.
That specific script is designed specifically for building an azure project that is then continuously delivers to Azure and you likley can't use it as you are. You can however create another script and use that. I would suggest you try instead to use the Default build script and use a powershell script within the build to collect the files and then push them to Azure.
If you want to go a little more advanced you could create a copy of the default and make one that does not require MSBuild at all.
Related
Has anyone used Azure DevOps to deploy an Umbraco v8 application to Azure?
I can successfully deploy via Visual Studio, but Azure DevOps only seems to copy over all the dlls to the target, no views or anything, and a zip does not get generated.
If anyone has managed this could they share the steps they took please?
The steps I have in the pipeline are:
Build
Test
Deploy
Publish Symbols
Copy File to
Publish Artifact
What I did notice is that I need a publish profile to successfully publish from Visual Studio, however I cant see where a profile should be included in Devops, unless it should be in the build arguments?
My current build arguments:
/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:WebPublishMethod=Package /p:PackageAsSingleFile=true /p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true /p:PackageLocation="$(build.artifactstagingdirectory)\"
I'm using the Visual Studio Build task.
To straight up answer your question, yes MSBuild arguments make or break the deployment here.You can see mine in my screenshot. I took it from a production deployment that's successful for Umbraco.
So I can't see your actual pipeline, but from what I see you don't actually 'build' the application.
As in you have to use Nuget first, then restore the packages, then build the application. You don't need to copy anything (so you don't need a copy step), with the correct MS Build arguments it will build and copy to build.artifactstagingdirectory on its own. Then you need to have the appropriate release pipeline, but one thing at a time. The build steps I use are underneath. After the npm custom step is the actual building of the application.
P.S. Make sure that the appropriate files to run the application are included in the csproj, because that's where azure devops reads what to pick and build.
I'll assume that you're simply copying files onto a VM and that you have dealt with the deployment of your database / content.
If you want to copy all the files from your Visual Studio project you need to ensure that your MSBuild will copy them into the build/artifact directory.
In order to copy the files that you're missing you need to ensure that you have set the “Build Action” to “Copy to output directory” for example your views or pretty much anything that you'd code in App_Data. This is how you'd set the build action in VS: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/build-actions?view=vs-2019
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
We have 2 Azure Webjobs connected to our ASP WebApi application. None of them is using any dependencies from the other one. And yet, after publishing, one of them has executables from the other one. It's worth mantioning that this only happens on publish. Everything is normal on VS build.
This is how files hierachy looks like on Azure FTP
The first one, Deployment, is being published as expected. Those are executables in it's folder:
The second one, EmailSender, has executables from the Deployment:
What's curious, there is also app.publish folder in both of them, containing only one and the same file WebJob.Deployment.exe:
Deployment job works fine. Unfortunately Azure don't recognize EmailSender job, instead it executes Deployment. The only solution that works right now is to manualy delete Deployment's executables directly from FTP, on every publish.
Right now we tried couple of things from SO and blogs, but with no success.
Microsoft.Web.WebJobs.Publish producing duplicate assemblies in deploy package
Azure Webjobs not getting updated after new publish
GitHub solution
Azure Web Job Run Command Incorrectly Set
Edit:
I did accomplished something. It did not resolve the problem, but we don't have app.publish folder anymore. Here is the link to solution on SO. I don't know why we had 'ClickOnce security' options checked for WebJob.Deployment application.
Update:
I run few tests with MSBuild and found something curious. As I said before, Visual Studio Publish works just fine - no additional executables are deployed. But when I run MSBuildprogram (with the same publish profile and project configuration) I got additional Deployment.exe inside EmailsSender folder. This is the command I run:
MSBuild RestAPI.Host.csproj /t:Build /p:Configuration="Develop" /p:Platform="AnyCPU" /p:DocumentationFile="RestAPI.Host.XML" /p:DeployOnBuild="true" /p:PublishProfile="fakebuild_develop.pubxml" /p:OutputPath="backend\build\app\\" /p:SolutionDir="backend\\"
Can someone tell me what's the difference between MSBuild and VS Publish? I cannot find anything usefull on the internet.
I am trying to setup the CI for Azure Web Jobs using local TFS 2013. The build server itself is fully patched and has Build Tools 2017 installed. I have tried a standalone Web Jobs project in a solution as well as a solution with a Web project and Web Jobs project. From VS2017 the publish (in case of Web project and Web Jobs project) and Publish as WebJobs (in case of standalone Web Jobs project) work just fine and everything gets deployed. NuGet package Microsoft.Web.WebJobs.Publish is included. In both scenarios, the local build/publish publish properly website as well as jobs in app_data/... folder but TFS builds don't even create app_data folders. It seems the final collection of files for publishing is trying to pick the files from WebJobs/bin/** folder which isn't even created in TFS build. The TFS builds add additional argument /p:OutDir="C:\Builds\2\iPayment.Core\Dev-iPayment.ServiceBus.Agents\Binaries\\ and the assembly files for WebJobs are not collected and thus not dropped into app_data/... The build parameters are passed as
/p:PublishProfile=ReleaseWebDeploy
/p:_DestinationType=AzureWebSite
/p:DeployOnBuild=True
/p:WebPublishMethod=Package
/p:PackageAsSingleFile=true
/p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true
The symptoms are similar to what are described in http://chamindac.blogspot.com/2015/08/package-azure-web-job-with-tfs-build-to.html but my version of XAML build is slightly different than in the blog post and there is nothing to override the OutDir without probably modifying the build template itself.
In a standalone WebJobs project, if I use the MSBuild command line without the OutDir, the bin/** are created and packaged properly and get deployed to Azure but that option doesn't work for the solution where both WebProject and WebJobs are in a single solution and need to be deployed together. Also, I could not find any way to empty the OutDir outside of XAML definition.
I have confirmed the presence of webjob-publish-settings.json (in both cases) and webjobs-list.json (in case of where solution has WebProject as well as WebJobs), which is actually needed and works fine from VS2017 deployment. The publish profile is also correct and it is used by the VS2017 deployment. The TFS build is configured to build the solution in both cases. Microsoft.Web.WebJobs.Publish.1.1.0 is used which is the latest version.
It turns out that the OutputPath property was not being set in our template. There is no "Output Location" to be set as "As Configured". I ended up passing MSBuild Arguments and modifying the template to do the replacement for $(OutDir) in two places
MSBuildArguments.Replace("$(OutDir)", [BinariesDirectory]))] and MSBuildArguments.Replace("$(OutDir)", [outputDirectory]))] respectively for <mtbwa:MSBuild ...> under "Try to Compile the Project" and "For Each Configuration in BuildSettings.PlatformConfigurations"
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.