We have an ImageVault website that we do not develop ourselves. But want version management in TFS and be able to publish against tests and production servers.
It does not need to be built because it is already finished.
How should you set up a building when you should not build anything?
Is it possible to set up a pipeline without having a building?
It is possible to set up a pipeline that doesnot build your project. You project is built by the build tasks in the pipeline. You can just disable or exclude the build tasks from your pipeline if you donot want your project be built.
You can also create an empty pipeline without any tasks inside. You can follow below steps to create an empty pipeline.
1,Sign in to your Azure DevOps organization and navigate to your project.
2,In your project, navigate to the Pipelines page. Choose the Pipelines tab and click new pipeline on the top right corner of the page.
3,Walk through the steps of the wizard by first selecting the location of your source code.(You can create a classic UI pipeline by choosing "Use the classic editor to create a pipeline without YAML".)
4,Then choose to start with An Empty Job under Select a template
With above steps, a pipeline without build tasks is created. You can then add some utility tasks like copy file task, publish artifacts task etc. Utility tasks donot do the building work.
You might need to add some utility tasks like publish build artifacts tasks if you want to deploy release pipeline.
Check here to learn more about creating your pipeline
Related
I have created a c++ pipeline where the output of the build pipeline is published to drop container. The structure is the following
drop/v1.0.0/Release/MyService.dll
drop/v1.1.0/Release/MyService.dll
drop/v1.1.0/Release/MyService.dll
My engineers will need to view drop folder and according to the version that needs to be manually deployed to a client the will download the dll file.
As far as I understand there is not any way to view them under Artifacts (what a shame). I go to the project settings under Storage but I cannot view them either there. Only place that I am able to find them is under the pipeline run and then I have to find in which version of the pipeline run a specific service version was produced. This is a maze. We have dozens of c++ projects and we have to keep track of which pipeline version run of each project matches the service version.
Is there any way to be able to access them like in a folder structure?
You could use Builds - List via rest API to get all the builds for a pipeline, then use : Artifacts - List rest API to get all the artifacts for a build. It will list all the download URL for artifacts, then you could download them together or choose the one you want to download.
Besides, you could use the publishLocation argument in publish build artifacts task to copy the artifacts to a file share (FilePath). And the file share must be accessible from the agent running the pipeline. In this way you could publish all your artifacts to the file share you want for better management.
In addition, you could also use Universal Package task to publish your artifacts to your feed for better review.
I have four environments that I deploy to.
I also have four different code branches that we use to deploy code from.
We constantly switch the branches we use to deploy on these environments.
One time I want to build and deploy a daily branch on my test environment.
Later I want to build and deploy a enhancements branch on the same test environment.
Next I want to build and deploy the daily branch on my test2 environment.
I think you get the picture
We are currently using a manual process to pull from the branch we want deployed, then zip it up and push it to AWS code deploy.
Using Azure DevOps pipeline and release what is the easiest method to allow me to switch to use different branchs on different environments.
I currently have a successful setup in Azure DevOps that performs a gradle build, creates the artifact and then lets me push it over to AWS CodeDeploy on one of my environments. I just can't seem to figure out a way to eastily swtich the branch without creating tons of Azure pipelines and releases.
Thanks all!
Where you manually trigger a build pipeline by clicking Queue or Run Pipeline, A new windows shown as below will be prompted which allows you to switch the branches.
If you want to automatically deploy different branch to different environment. You can push the build artifacts over to AWS CodeDeploy in a release pipeline and set the branch filters. Please refer to below steps:
1, set branch filter in the build pipeline as shown in below screenshot which will build the selected branched. Check here for more information about triggers.
2, create a release pipline to push build artifacts over to AWS CodeDeploy.
And Set the Artifact filters which will only allow the artifacts built from the specified branch to be deployed to this tage.
You could use a queue time variable to specify the branch name you would like to use on your build pipeline. You would need to:
Edit your build pipeline and create the variable on the "variables" tab. Make sure to mark the "Settable at queue time" check
variable creation
Update the source of your build pipeline, to specify the new variable under the "Default branch" option. It would look something like this:
pipeline source
RUN your pipeline. Before finally clicking on RUN, you will be able to specify the desire branch:
set variable value
Hope this works
I use azure pipeline for build my solution.
Aftere build I need to generate and upload multiple packages with different assets. Packing implemented as a number of additional tasks in my agent job.
But I need ability to generate only selected packages or all packages based on specified arguments.
What is the best way to achieve this?
Ideally, it would have 2 pipelines. The first is automatic project build. And the second should use the result of the first and be able to repeatedly start manually with the desired parameters to exclude project rebuild. But I do not know how this can be implemented.
Not sure if I understand the question correctly, but two possible answers would be:
Classic pipelines, with build pipeline for project build and release pipeline for uploading the artifact(s) that build generates, if using release pipeline is applicable. Release pipeline can have a cd-trigger for the first run, and redeployed manually after that. If need to change release variables for subsequent deployments, you can create a new release with the same build artifact.
Multi-staged pipeline, with build and upload as different stages, manually redeploy/rerun the upload stage when needed. Build phase generates deployable pipeline artifact(s).
Somehow I think you're looking for more elaborate solution, as you state that you're already using pipelines. So how about creative use of conditional tasks (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/conditions?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml) using pre-defined variables like Build.Reason (with value 'Manual') to exclude the execution of certain tasks in some runs. Then group tasks you want to re-use into either build templates or task groups.
In my solution, I have two projects (a Asp.net MVC and a Windows Service). I want to create CI/CD pipeline to deploy web application and windows service on different VMs. But to achieve this my CI pipeline should be able to publish artifacts separately for both project and then I can feed these artifacts in CD pipeline for deployment. How artifacts for all projects can be published separately in a CI pipeline ?
PS: If I create two solutions each with one project only and create CI/CD pipeline separately, all works fine. But I want to achieve it with solution having multiple project as mentioned above.
You can use multiple, Publish tasks to create multiple artifacts in a single build definition.
For example lets say, you have below, as your current artifacts for a single project, comprising of _PublishedWebsites\MVS5WebApp (XCopy deployable website) and _PublishedWebsites\MVS5WebApp_Package (web deploy package).
If you want to separate these two, into two artifacts, you can use two Publish Artifact tasks as shown below, each one specifying exact path to publish (this path does not support wildcards, you just have to specify the folder you need to publish)
This will give you output as shown below.
In this example I just only used the Publish Artifacts task and created two artifacts using a single web site project. You can do same for your two project scenario. If you want to use wild card to filter more files before publish you can use "Copy File" task multiple times as required.
If you are using '.net core' task in the build pipeline then uncheck the checkbox 'Publish web projects' just after the command textbox.
Then it automatically creates publish artifacts separate for each project in the solution with the same name as each of the project files.
You have multiple ways to achieve that.
You can either create multiple build definitions targeting the project and not the solution in the build step with the proper arguments.
Or you can have one build definition with multiple build steps.
After that on the release side of things you can either leverage one release definition with multiple steps or multiple release definitions.
I have used the
/p:GenerateProjectSpecificOutputFolder=True for creating build for each and every project in my solution and now i wanted to customerize the folder structure on my needs. How can we achieve this?
enter image description here
If you are using XAML build, you can customize Binaries folder in TFS Team Build by modifying the build process template. Adding CreateDirectory Activity and FindMatchingFiles activity are necessary, following this blog for more details.
If you use the new build system, that will be much easier to manage artifacts. With task Publish Build Artifacts, you can specify contents in the task, also you can add as many Publish Build Artifacts task as you want to manage artifacts. More details, check http://www.codewrecks.com/blog/index.php/2015/06/30/manage-artifacts-with-tfs-build-vnext/
Alternatively you can extend your build definition with a PowerShell script at different points within the build:
Pre-build
Post-build
Pre-test
Post-test
Note I am using the TfvcTemplate.12.xaml template. This is the build template that comes with TFS 2013.