Via VSTS I am trying to automate the following process which is currently performed manually:
Within VS 2017 perform a publish to file system.
Set settings in web.config.
Repeat 1 & 2, for each environment, e.g. Test, UAT, Production, etc.
Copy those files to an FTP server.
Logon to secure infrastructure, download files from FTP, and copy into place on IIS target servers.
The secure infrastructure is locked down, and has limited internet access. The FTP is used as a way to move files into that infrastructure.
Within this question I specifically want to address elements; 1, 2, and 3.
The struggle I am having is that VSTS seems setup to deploy web apps into Azure Web Sites or publicly accessible IIS. Whilst IIS is my eventual target, initially I was hoping to achieve a file system deployment - similar to what VS 2017 provides.
I have tried using MSBuild to create a package, using; /p:WebPublishMethod=Package /p:PackageAsSingleFile=true.
Then MSDeploy to extract the package into a folder msdeploy.exe -verb:sync -source:package="Package.zip" -dest:contentPath="content".
However that results in the following error Source (sitemanifest) and destination (contentPath) are not compatible for the given operation.
It looks like I can use MSBuild and /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=VSTS to deploy to a folder at build time, but that seems a little awkward within the structure of VSTS. E.g. I have to repeatedly build the solution for each environment.
After I have the solution deployed into a folder, I intend to use VSTS to push to FTP.
Is there a better way to do this? For example; VSTS Azure deploy provides the ability to easily set connection sting parameters.
You can achieve what you want to do with the FTP Upload build/release task.
1 - You don't have to publish to the file system.
Just create a new build definition based on asp.net application template:
This will add the tasks you need to build and package and as a final step to publish the artifacts to a drop location.
After you published it to a drop location you can either continue on build by adding the ftp task or you could add the ftp task to a release pipeline. This is up to you.
The ftp upload task then needs to be added after the publish artifacts task, like:
For 2 and 3 it is best that you use a release pipeline, where you can add several environments and tasks to it. That you can add your ftp task and get it from artifact (your build) that you will add to the release. The web.config settings can also be changed using release tasks.
Related
I have been trying to figure this out for a few days to no avail.
I have an MVC .Net Application that is stored in a GIT repo in VSTS. When I check in code it is being built and unit testa are being run in the cloud.
Now If these unit tests succeed I would like the project to be deployed to a remote machine that has the VSTS agent installed. I can see the agent in the VSTS web interface but I don't know how I get the automatic build to send the completed build to d:/mydeploypath on the remote agent machine.
Is this possible?
Absolutely possible!
There are build steps available to copy files to a remote machine such as Copy Files over SSH and Windows Machine File Copy. But if you are trying to deploy the code to the machine you are building on, you can use the Copy Files step since it won't require credentials. Since it is a web application, there are a few steps like IIS Utilities to stop\start the application pool so the files won't be locked for the deployment.
So using the Copy Files build step, you could use $(Agent.BuildDirectory) as the source directory (or wherever you have your build output going) and set the target folder to your desired destination on the machine.
The build/release variables helped me out a lot during the development of our release process:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/pipelines/build/variables?view=vsts
The easy way is using WinRM-IIS Web App Deployment task.
To generate the web deployment package, you can specify these arguments in MSBuild Arguments box of Visual Studio Build task:
/p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:WebPublishMethod=Package /p:PackageLocation="$(build.artifactstagingdirectory)" /P:PackageTempRootDir=""
We're trying to work through the new tool chain for building and deploying an ASP.NET 5 (vNext) CoreCLR web site to a server cluster. Between the new compilation changes and the changes to TFS, I'm not sure how everything now gets built and deployed. The scenario is as follows:
On-premise TFS for source control and build agent
Targeting ASP.NET 5 under CoreCLR, hosted via IIS
Questions are:
Using TFS for continuous integration builds (and hopefully deployment to an on-premise IIS server), how does one build and deploy this new application type?
It seems like MSBuild might still be usable to point at a .sln file so as to indirectly invoke dnu.exe, is that correct? Is that the appropriate way to do that now?
Should we be running a scripted build task instead to run dnu.exe instead?
How are these new CoreCLR builds deployed? Just a straight copy to a directory on a remote machine?
This is a new application and we're using a multi-layered application architecture, where the DAL and Business logic are in their own CoreCLR projects, if that makes a difference.
Thanks in advance for shedding some light on the situation.
Here is what we ended up doing:
Powershell script "prebuild.ps1" as per the previous answer and Microsoft deployment guidelines: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/Build/azure/deploy-aspnet5
Vanilla MSBuild build. no switches or special settings.
Powershell script to execute xUnit test runner. We used guidance from this post at http://fluentbytes.com/running-xunit-test-with-asp-net-dnx-and-tfs-2015-build/
Powershell script to run "dnu publish". This creates a directory of the entire web application's structure.
"Windows File Copy" task to deploy the directory structure created in #4 to all of the target machines in the test environment.
To build and deploy ASP.NET 5 via TFS2015 vNext build system, you need to:
1). Create a PowerShell script (named Prebuild.ps1, for example) to install DNX. Details of the PowerShell script can be found: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/Build/azure/deploy-aspnet5 . Add the script file into TFS version control.
2). Add the PowerShell script build step into build definition. Run the Prebuild.ps1 script in this step:
3). In the MSBuild step, specify the project needs to be built, and add the following /p:DeployOnBuild=True /p:DeployTarget=MSDeployPublish /p:CreatePackageOnPublish=True /p:MSDeployPublishMethod=InProc /p:MsDeployServiceUrl=localhost /p:DeployIisAppPath="Default Web Site/TFSTest1" /p:VisualStudioVersion=14.0 to publish the project to IIS.
I'm starting to use MSDeploy quite aggressively within our Visual studio web projects projects as a mechanism for producing self contained build artefacts that have everything needed to setup and run themselves on a remote server. This works fine for simple web apps, however we have some web applications that need additional command line tools to be run on the remote servers before the application can be considered to be "deployed".
I have followed Sayed's advice to include additional files and folders within my package, but they appear as a subfolder within the deploy of my web application (and that's not good, as the files are only needed once at deploy time).
Ideally, I'd like the package.zip to contain the tools as a set of sibling folders to the IIS aplication, and have a mechanism to run an exe within those folders at deploy time. (I think this is via the deploy.manifest, but would like advice here too) but NOT actually leave the files on the remote machine.
Here's what I want to do:
Build an existing .csproj that targets "Package"
Publish the package with MSDeploy to an IIS 6 server
This is for a TeamCity build and release that I'm trying to configure in a single step. I could create a custom build file but I'm trying to tackle this without adding any additional configurations to the app.
There are a lot of examples around of MSBuild parameters which can do this publishing via WMSVC - here's a great one - but that's not going to play ball with IIS 6. Are there equivalent params which can be used when there is a dependency on MsDepSvc? Is this even possible or am I left with either a custom build script or a package build followed by a publish build?
You can modify an existing .csproj file to add any additional target needed (it's just an MSBuild file) and publishing to an IIS6 server can be done via different MSDeploy providers (webServer60, metaKey, or contentPath via a share).
While this would be possible to do by adding a Target in the MSBuild of your project, I'd recommend that you split these two activities out into two separate targets. By splitting them into two separate targets you can still call them together msbuild /t:Package;Deploy but you can also call them independently.
This would allow you to create a deployment package and have TeamCity include it as an artifact of the build. You could then download this package from TeamCity and deploy it to any server independently, even if you deployed it automatically. If TeamCity also creates your release builds, you know have your production deployment
I have various IIS hosted service hosts with simple svc files etc. What I want to do is to be able to create deployment packages from our test server using IIS Export Package in a way that parameters may be saved and picked up at Export time so that the Export is repeatable and automatable. I.e. the Export will always use the necessary Manifest extensions such as XmlFile etc.
The web sites exist in the solutions and are then picked up using a Web Deployment project in each solution so that config substitutions are done etc.
We are currently on VS 2008 SP1 so do not have direct access to VS 2010
The first issue I have with MsBuild (running in TeamCity) is how to build the IIS web site (with target=Package) when there is no project file? In this way maybe I can avoid the Web Deployment projects (I use them for various configurations but don't want to do it this way for deploying to Production but rather export from our fully tested staging into a package file to be imported onto a production server).
Secondly, I want to avoid having to configure the Export in IIS 7 each time I run it. I want it simply to pick up the correct set of extensions to use and create the necessary parameters for me. Is this done from a Manifest file? I can see how to use the parameters.xml but I am unclear whether I need to use a manifest.xml (created by hand) and how to link it in. The idea is that a tester/deployment person should be able to do the Export simply without having to enable all of the extensions that are required
Any help or guidance will be greatly appreciated.
Ok, in the meantime I got it figured out.
I ended up using the document at Package an Application for the Windows Web Application Gallery which gave me the means by which I could extend our automated build in TeamCity to create the "repeatable" export packages.
In short I will use the current Web Deployment Projects to create the deployment artefacts and then in MsBuild combine them with the pre-prepared manifest.xml and parameters.xml files into Build artefacts folder and zip them up into a package. From there the task will be to Import the package into IIS Deploy in the target environment.
The parameters.xml file will be used to set the HostName for wcf clients and services, connection strings, app settings etc.
This turned out to be the best solutuion bcause I can put it into our automated build.