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.
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 an automated build process set up to run from a build definition in TFS, which publishes a web application and generates/executes a database project script successfully via publish profiles that are passed as msbuild arguments in the build process definition. Everything is now running as expected except that several unnecessary files are being deployed to the target folder, including the .csproj file, all of the config transforms, and the properties folder which contains all of my publish profiles.
This is strange because 1. It's definitely not including ALL files/folders and mostly appears to be including ones used by the publish profile like transforms, while applying the transform correctly and excluding any explicitly excluded file (as defined in the pubxml), and 2. The process works perfectly if I do it by publishing from the project in Visual Studio 2013. I have the profile configured to only include files needed by the application, and I've confirmed in the csproj file that this property is there.
I tried excluding the properties folder from deployment in the pubxml file, but this causes the build to crash because it can't find the assembly file. What I've gathered is that the process is keeping all files it needs to complete the build, and dropping all of those files in my destination folder. FWIW, I'm using the "file system" method and I'm not sure yet if web deploy will make a difference. I haven't been able yet to connect to the target server with web deploy, but that's a separate problem to solve. Is there something in the build that I can configure so that my destination folder has only the files it needs to run the application, and not the files needed to BUILD the application?
FYI I also have not been using a drop folder, I'm not sure if that makes a difference or not but that might be the only thing I haven't tested as it doesn't seem necessary since I'm using a publishprofile and don't want to use the default tfs build configuration.
I found a solution that works well enough, after reading this: http://www.asp.net/web-forms/tutorials/deployment/advanced-enterprise-web-deployment/excluding-files-and-folders-from-deployment
This was a little uglier solution than I wanted, since it requires hard-coding the names of excluded files, but it does the trick and only requires identifying the files and folders in one location instead of altering a publish profile for each target environment. I created a wpp.targets file and used the ExcludeFromPackageFolders and ExcludeFromPackageFiles elements to identify the extra files. Ironically, if I don't also name the wpp.targets file in the exclude element, THAT file is included in my package. It's possible MSDeploy doesn't have the same issues with TFS as filesystem, but after spending half a day trying to work through a different set of issues and permissions workarounds, we decided that file system is a cleaner publishing method.
I try to set up a MSBuild-project that will copy the file(s) that are being checked in into TFS (2010) to a specific directory at the Build-server (or share).
I have the Build Definition as a Continuous Integration, but how can I get to the specifics files I am checking in, and copy only those to the directory?
(The best would be If only inchecked *.sql-files should be copied, but if all files I am checking in goes there It's ok. I can manage it from there.)
Does anybody know how to only copy the chosen files?
By default there is no way to do this. There is no standard out-of-the-box build activity that does this for you.
What you can do is to create a small Custom Build Activity that checks which ChangeSets are associated to your build. Then use teh VersionControlServer class int he TFS Client Object Model (specifically the DownloadFile method) to download the changed files in these changesets and save them to wherever you want. Remember to pass in the VersionSpec you can use the c##### changeset number format.
If you just want the files that are in the Builds workspace you need to do a few more things (checking the Workspace Mapping of the Build Definition).
See also:
Microsoft ALM Rangers Build Customization Guide
Community TFS Build Extensions
The GetChangeSet activity in the TFS Build Extensions should provide a great starting point.
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 brand new to using TeamCity.
I have my .NET C# application building via a MSBuild "build step" in TeamCity. Once it is built, I would like TeamCity to copy the entire contents of the "Release" folder to a secondary location where we keep current and recent builds.
I cannot build to this location directly because there are other files which my application requires (databases, XML config files, etc..) that reside permanently in the Debug and Release folders. I know this is horrible and I would need a soapbox to complain about the decisions my predecessor made, but for not I am forced to keep that portion as-is.
You can add a command line build step with a simple xcopy command.
It will be executed only when every previous build step succeeds.