Currently working on a PHP/HTML/JS project that is made up of a 'core' directory and multiple individual 'product' directories.
Dir structure as follows...
Core
JS
PHP
Product1
JS
PHP
build.xml
Product2
JS
PHP
build.xml
The ANT build script lies in each respective product directory. When triggering an ANT build, the core files are copied into a deploy directory, then the respective product files are merged into (and overwritten if necessary) the same directory. ANT then runs Qunit, PHPUnit tests, concatenates and minimizes the javascript etc. This new deploy directory is then copied to the CI environment.
My question is, is this the best way of doing this? Is there a way to introduce versioning of the core files - so product1 might use v1.2 of core files?
This method also causes problems when running the application locally - effectively on every change of a file, the build script needs to be run again.
Does anyone have any suggestions of how to improve this?
Related
I am trying to exclude certain files/folders from deployment of a web project in Visual Studio Online to an Azure website.
The web project has a Content folder with CSS, JS, build scripts and so on, which are only necessary for development, once deployed to Azure the CSS and JS is loaded from a CDN. Currently the build from VSO is copying all those files to the webroot in Azure, which is unnecessary and a potential security issue in case of the build scripts.
Now I know this can be prevented by setting the build action of a file to None, but this a very tedious solution because there is a lot of development going on, new files get added all the time and it is easy to forget this setting.
First I tried setting the Content folder to Cloaked in the build definitions source settings, but this only causes VSO to not download this folder on build, msbuild will still complain that those files are missing.
Is there a way to tell msbuild to ignore the whole Content folder? I already tried adding /p:ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment="Content" as a msbuild argument in the build definition, and also tried the solutions in here How to get Visual Studio 'Publish' functionality to include files from post build event?, but nothing is working.
I was studying msbuild log files and came up with a solution that is good enough for us to work with.
The first thing I learned was that I cannot prevent msbuild from copying files with build action Content to the output directory, at least not without changing the Microsoft.WebApplication.targets file, which I didn't want to do and am not even sure is possible with VSO build.
Anyway because of this we cannot set the source settings of our Content folder to Cloaked in the build definition, since this will cause the build to fail.
What we ended up doing was described in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3140349/1230302
So by adding the ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment statement to the .csproj file, the Content folder is excluded from the webroot.
<PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU'">
<OutputPath>bin\</OutputPath>
<ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment>Content</ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment>
</PropertyGroup>
It is not an ideal solution, but at least this way nothing gets deployed if a developer forgets to set the build action to None.
The built in continuous delivery options are designed for convenience. Of you need something custom, like skipping deployment of files that have not changed, then you will need to write something yourself.
You can easily call PowerShell to complete any task from the build process.
If you'd like to customize your build as part of the VSO build system, you can just override your BuildTemplate.xaml file.
Visual Studio Build uses Windows Workflow (xaml) to make a workflow on what the build is supposed to do. You can edit this file and do any modifications to the directory structure before or after the build.
Here is an example.
I have configurated about 100 different Run configurations in my node project. recently was introduced into the project some environment variables
How to share the same info between all run configurations without edit one by one
There is no way to perform such an operation in the IntelliJ IDEA UI. However, the run configurations are stored as .xml files under the .idea directory in your project root. You can run a batch operation on these files to make the changes you need.
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 have a PhoneGap project that use custom MSBuild scripts running in TeamCity as a CI build.
What I want to add now is zip and send the project files with the PhoneGap REST API on each check-in.
But before sending the files I need to make a few changes inside the head node of the index.html since there are URIs to a service that differs from DEBUG, TEST, RELEASE environments.
Is there any way I could use something like #ifdef with build properties on a .html file or is there perhaps an even better way of solving this scenario using MsBuild/TeamCity?
You could setup custom tokens (like "##replace this##") and then simply update HTML content using TeamCity PowerShell build step.
Ok, so I've got a somewhat complicated problem with my build environment that I'm trying to deal with.
I have a solution file that contains multiple C# projects which is built by a NAnt script calling MSBuild - passing MSBuild the name of the solution file and a path to copy the binaries to. This is because I want my automated build environment (CruiseControl.Net) to create a folder named after the revision of each build - this way I can easily go back to previous binaries for any reason.
So idealy I have a folder layout like this
c:\build\nightly\rev1
c:\build\nightly\rev2
c:\build\nightly\rev3
...
c:\build\nightly\rev10
etc.
The problem that's arisen is I recently added the latest version of the Unity IoC container to my project, checking it directly out of MS's online SVN repository. What's happening is I have a Silverlight 3 project that references the Silverlight version of Unity but I also have other projects (namely my Unit testing project) that reference the standard (non-Silverlight) version of Unity.
So what happens is since MSBuild is dumping everything into one single folder the Silverlight version of the Unity assembly is overwriting the non-Silverlight version because they have the exact same assembly file name.
Then when CruistControl runs my unit tests they fail because they don't have the proper dependencies available anymore (they try to load the Silverlight specific Unity assembly which obviously doesn't work).
So what I want to do is:
keep my desired output directory
structure (folder\revision)
I don't want to have to manually edit
every single proj file I have as this
is error prone when adding new
projects to the solution
Idealy I would like MSBuild to put everything into a folder structure similar to this:
nightly\revision1\project1
nightly\revision1\project2
nightly\revision1\project3
...
nightly\revision2\project1
nightly\revision2\project2
nightly\revision2\project3
etc
I can't modify the Unity project to give it a different file name because it comes from another SVN repository I cannot commit changes to. I found a similar question posted here and the suggested solution was to use a "master" MSBuild file that used a custom task to extract all the project file names out of the solution then loop over each one building them. I tried that but it doesn't build them in the order of their dependencies, so it fails for my project.
Help?
Firstly I would always have the build server delete the old working copy and check out a fresh copy to avoid any problems with stale artifacts from the previous build.
Next I would have nant or msbuild build the solutions as before with the artifacts from each build going to their local working output folders.
After that I'd move the artifacts from their working paths to their output paths, this shouldn't require digging through the project files since you can just tell msbuild/nant to copy working\project1\bin\release\**\*.* to artifacts\project1\.
The script that does this should ideally be stored along with the source with the main file, e.g. build.nant or build.proj in top level of the trunk.
For third party libraries I would simple include the DLLs directory in your repository. Nothing worse than writing some code and having a third party dependency break your build because of changes on their end.
Simply document the versions of the libraries you are using, and if you must update them, you'll have a better sense of what breaks the build before you even check it in.
Also, doesn't CC.Net automatically handle the providing of releases based on revision? I'm using TeamCity and it keeps a copy of the artifacts of every build.
I highly recommend reading JP Boodhoo's Automating Builds with NAnt blog series. That's been my starting point and have made lots of changes for my own taste. I also highly recommend checking out the builds of many open sources projects for examples. I've learned a lot from the builds of the Castle/Nhibernate/Rhino-Tools stack.