I have a number of WCF web services that I am trying to deploy to a directory structure on a TFS Build. The project structure looks something like this:
Services Directory (svc.sln)
- Project1 (project1.csproj)
- Project2 (project2.csproj)
- Project3 (project3.csproj)
- ServicesProject
- Project1
- Project1.svc
- Project2
- Project2.svc
- Project3
- Project3.svc
- bin
- Project1.dll
- Project2.dll
- Project3.dll
So, In order to deploy this, on my desktop, I simply load ServicesProject.csproj, publish, select a publish profile and it will happily publish to a single directory (ready to be copied across to IIS).
I then tried to add this to a TFS build, using the arguments:
/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=MyPublishProfile
I got an error, saying that:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v12.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets (182): Could not copy the file "bin\Project1.dll" because it was not found.
I had a look in the agent build directory and, sure enough, there was only one dll in there (ServicesProject.dll). I then changed the build to build svc.sln, but I still get the same error. I checked the build order for the sln file, and it does have ServicesProject last, however, the log file indicates that it gets built second.
I've provided so much detail, in case the answer to this lies in the approach I'm taking, rather than the specifics of what I'm actually doing.
My question is: am I doing this correctly and, if so, why is the sln file being build in the wrong order. Is there an easier way to achieve this?
I would suggest that any deployment from TF Build is the wrong way to achieve this. You should instead look to output the website, which is automatic, and deploy it using Release Management.
http://nakedalm.com/create-release-management-pipeline-professional-developers/
RM is built into TFS, all though you need to install it separately, and lets you create a deployment using PowerShell. It's very easy to do deployment and configuration of your website, and in the post you can see switching variables is also trivial.
Much easyer than trying to shoehorn deployment into a build tool.
Related
We just upgraded to TFS2015 (onsite) and I'm trying to set up a build that will do the same thing as my xaml builds but I can't seem to get the same files built. Here's a picture of the xaml output directory that I use to publish the site. To get this I navigate to the build folder then drill down to the _PublishedWebsites\BOTWSitecoreWeb folder:
Here's a picture of the solution explorer:
So as you can see BOTWSitecoreWeb is my startup project and it forms the basis for the website. So to publish this website I simply copy the folder: _PublishedWebsites\BOTWSitecoreWeb to my IIS directory. Here's what it looks like using the xaml build:
And if I drill down into the TFS2015 build output folder into the Drops/Source/sc/Website folder I get this, which has many more files and folders than what I'm expecting:
So my question is how can I get the same output that I currently get from my xaml builds from a TFS2015 build?
The bin folder has the same number of files, so that's a good start. Here's the bin folder from the xaml build:
And here's the bin folder from the TFS 2015 build. Notice that they both have 57 files, which I assume is a good thing!
Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide!
Ben
Update your build definition to below:
Add /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:OutDir="$(build.artifactstagingdirectory)\\" arguments in Visual Studio Build step:
Change "Path to Publish" of "Publish Build Artifacts" task to "$(build.artifactstagingdirectory)_PublishedWebsites\ProjectName":
Save the build definition and queue a build, now you should get the same files published in drop folder like XAML build.
vNext build and XAML build, it's totally different technology. There won't be any automated ways of converting.
The new builds are based on a different architecture and run on a
completely different system.
So your situation is predictable, it's very hard to achieve a 100% conversion. Copy the folder in vNext will copy everything under the folder by default. Seems there are some customization during the copy or published in your XAML build which will return the result as above picture.
If you have heavily customized XAML builds and custom activities, you
can continue using those builds until you are ready to port your
business logic into scripts that can run in the new builds.
And you could also take a look at these series of articles how to upgrade from XAML to Build 2015 with minimal changes.
We're pretty new to TeamCity at work. We have a build & deployment pckage setup which is using MSBuild/MSDeploy to ship changes to our web servers. However, we have a few issues (apologies for putting a few questions on the same post). For clarification our solutions looks like so:
Project Folder
WebApp (includes .csproj file. Includes a folder called "media" - this folder is not in SVN)
Libraries (includes referenced assemblies)
Our issues:
There is a specific folder within the Libraries folder that must be copied into the bin directory after build (because of an assembly redirect). We have always used a PostBuild event, however this doesnt work in TeamCity.
The folder "media" within the WebApp folder is not included in SVN. When the TeamCity package is executed it deletes this folder. I would like to prevent TeamCity from deleting just this folder.
When we run the TeamCity task, we get an ERROR_FILE_IN_USE error for one of the files teamcity is trying to delete during the sync task. I have read about using the app_offline.htm file to combat this - but quite how Im not sure.
I'm going to guess that some of these settings can be command line parameters in the msbuild job - I think it would be better to store these in the csproj file rather than just in teamcity if it is possible?
thanks in advance
Al
A few questions on the information provided
Can you clarify what you mean by post-build command doesnt work? Does it fail or does it just not do what you expect?
How have you setup your post-build command? does it reference specific filepaths? TeamCity executes MSBuild in the same was as you could from the command line or from visual studio.
Regarding the MSDeploy folder issue, you can configure MSDeploy with a Skip Action, here's a link to another post describing how to do this
Prevent MSDeploy (selectively) from deleting folders on target IIS server
Because MSDeploy is trying to deploy into a folder being used by IIS you are also seeing the file locking issue. There are two solutions
1. Add a teamcity step to stop IIS (using PowerShell) before deploying. This will cause downtime.
2. Deploy to a different folder and then switch IIS to point to your new folder. This is a much better solution as you also have roll back.
A much easier solution to all of this is to use a Deployment Tool such as Octopus Deploy to deploy your application. You can learn more about Octopus Deploy at http://octopusdeploy.com/
I am setting up TeamCity to deploy our Website Project application (using a *.wdproj) and Web Deploy application to IIS.
I have a build configuration that uses MSBuild.exe with the MSDeployPublish to build and then deploy the application.
We now want to get the application to deploy to multiple target environments, therefore need a way to supply different settings based on the target environment.
I have added a parameters.xml file to the Web Deployment Project, and have verified that the parameters set in here are making all the way through the target IIS server and being correctly applied - great!
Now what I want to do is have different parameter settings per environment. I was hoping I could use something like the MSDeploy.exe -setParam argument to specify different values for each environment, however I can find no way to get my parameter values into MSBuild via the commandline.
I suspect I might need to do one of the following:
Split MSBuild and MSDeploy into separate build steps.
Configure a task somewhere in the pipeline to take 1 of n versions of parameters.something.xml and move it into parameters.xml so it gets picked up by the rest of the pipeline.
I'm looking for the simplest way to move ahead at this point, any suggestions welcome.
For reference, here is the command I'm experimenting with now:
msbuild /target:MSDeployPublish MySite_deploy.wdproj /P:Configuration=Debug
/P:DeployOnBuild=True /P:DeployTarget=MSDeployPublish
/P:MsDeployServiceUrl=www.myserver.com:8172/MsDeploy.axd
/P:AllowUntrustedCertificate=True /P:MSDeployPublishMethod=WMSvc
/P:CreatePackageOnPublish=True /P:UserName=MyUser /p:Password=MyPassword
/P:DeployIisAppPath=www.myserver.com/MySite
/P:ServerURL=http://www.tryingtoforcethis.com
It's working beautifully except the value for ServerURL, which is a parameter I've defined in my parameters.xml, is not making its way into the target site. The default I specified in parameters.xml, however, is. So I know that the parameters are working, I just can't figure out how to add them to the msbuild commandline.
Well, I think the short answer is that with MSBuild 4.0 and VS2010, you can't just pass arbitrary parameters into MSDeployPublish from the call to MSBuild.
I found these posts helpful:
http://forums.iis.net/t/1167657.aspx/1 - Ming Chen's comments
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TinyHappyFeatures3PublishingImprovementsChainedConfigTransformsAndDeployingASPNETAppsFromTheCommandLine.aspx - the comments from Richard Szalay at the bottom
After reading these, and sifting through the Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets file for some time trying to find a "way in", I finally settled on having multiple copies of Parameters.xml in my project folder in source control, labelled according to their environment eg:
Parameters.Test.xml
Parameters.Staging.xml
Parameters.Live.xml
Then, prior to the package and deploy, I just copy one of these files into Parameters.xml and it gets picked up by the rest of the pipeline - done!
BTW I had a temporary problem getting the parameters.xml copy and subsequent cleanup to work within a single MSBuild.exe call due to what seems to be some sort of file access issue, I've detailed it here:
MSBuild.exe Copy task not working properly unless a version of the file already appears in target
To answer your question, the parameterization of your command line is not a concern of MSBuild. Instead, you should utilize external tools. For example, if you run your msbuild command from a batch file you could pass the parameters to the batch file and run it for each environment with different parameters. Another approach is to use a build system like TeamCity or VSTS and utilize their parameterization mechanism. Adapted for the VSTS or TFS, your command could look like this:
msbuild MySite_deploy.wdproj /target:MSDeployPublish /p:Configuration=Debug
/p:DeployOnBuild=True /p:MsDeployServiceUrl=$(IIsHostNameIp)
/p:AllowUntrustedCertificate=True /p:MSDeployPublishMethod=WMSvc
/p:CreatePackageOnPublish=True /p:UserName=$(IIsUserName) /p:Password=$(IIsPassword)
/p:DeployIisAppPath=$(IIsSite)
In addition, I would suggest some clean up for your origianl command line:
Using both /p:target and /p:DeployTarget is redundant. Any one of them is enough. Also it could be replaced with /p:WebPublishMethod.
For /p:MSDeployServiceUrl it is enough to only provide a DNS name or IP. the port and the Url is automatically derived from the /p:MSDeployPublishingMethod=WMSVC.
The custom parameter /p:ServerURL is unknown and won't be mapped anywhere.
msbuild.exe {build-script.proj} /property:{someParameter=someValue}
In your build script you can use $(someParameter) as a variable
I have a solution in VS2010 and it has three project, two of these projects have web config file, the projects have web config transformation for each environment (dev, test and prod).
At the process for TFS build option, I have the at the MSBuild Arguments : /p:DeployOnBuild=True
Everything looks good, the drop folder, the zip files and all structure for the final deployment. The issue I am facing the web config for test and prod is not created correctly after the final deployment, I could see at the drop folders the file projectName.SetParameters.xml, it contains the values for development when the build has been QUEUE for Test and Prod. One of the project has the correct web config (test and prod) but the other project has always the dev webconfig.
Is it a bug in the MS Build? What am I missing in the build parameters?
When I create a build deployment package the web config transformation creates the correct web config file, no issues with this process, but I do not want to use build deployment package to deploy my solution.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thank you.
In your Build Definition you probably defined the Configurations to use. Part of that also defines something like Any CPU or x86. As it turns out the solution the Platform "Any CPU" has a space where in the project files the Platform Any CPU does not have a space.
I found the best way to get around this was to leave the Platform blank and only put in the configuration name. VS will pop up a warning letting you know that there is data missing, you can just hit "Yes" to save it anyways. Alternatively you can just type in your configurations like the following |Release,|Debug.
The pattern is [PlatformName]|[ConfigurationName],[PlatformName]|[ConfigurationName],...
I've got a fairly large MVC2 project in TFS which gets built automatically on checkin (Continuous Integration)
At present, the fully built version is dumped on a network share on our dev IIS server. \\Server\wwwrootLatest
TFS of course creates lots of sub-folders since it's just doing a build, it isn't even aware that it's drop directory is a wwwroot.
This means that to actually USE the build, we need to go and manually create an IIS App which points at the appropriate directory - which defeats the whole object of the exercise.
When we do a manual publish to that server, we use "File System" as the method and just overwrite the files in the UNC share \\Server\wwwroot
(When publishing to other environments, we use full-on MSDeploy.)
What I'd like to do is convince TFS to do a "File system" publish after the build completes and duplicate what we do on a manual publish eg:
Drop directory is \\Server\Build which would result in something like \\Server\Build\Project\Date.Rev\
After that is complete, we want it to publish to \\Server\wwwrootLatest - we can then set up the App once which will always contain the latest version but will still have a full history if required.
The only examples I've been able to find use MSBuild commands in the build definition (fine) but all use MSDeploy to do a full-on publish. I'm not sure how to automate what I want to do
Any help appreciated.
In your drop folder a folder named _PublishedWebsites is generated automatically. It contains files you need to put in wwwroot. You can use CopyDirectory build activity to copy them automatically.