I have multiple ASP.NET web applications which I want to release into different VMs. Manually installing a DevOps agent in every single VM seems really inefficient. Is there a way to make this process faster? Is it possible to create release pipeline that could directly push the code to the public ip of the VM?
As workaround, you can prepare scripts to register each new agent. Here you can find parameters: Self-hosted Windows agents - Unattended config.
If you deploy your web application with IIS deployment task,
You can have a try using task Manage IIS, which can create website in a remote machine.
And then you can add a Windows machine file copy task to copy the build artifacts to the website Physical path in the remote machine.
Another workaround is that you can manage IIS with powershell script. So that you can add task PowerShell on target machines to run powershell script to manage IIS website. You can refer the example scripts at this page, and this page. For more information about IIS powrshell command you can refer here
Related
I have a requirement to integrate the JMeter scripts, checked-in a Git repository, with a DevOps pipeline so that I can run the JMeter scripts using a specific VM in Azure.
Basically, I should have all my jmxs and csvs in a git repository and when I run the pipeline, having a parameter of the script name, it should run the script on a specific VM (not with a static IP) and copy the jtl in some storage.
What is the best way to achieve this?
With a DevOps pipeline so that I can run the JMeter scripts using a
specific VM in Azure. What is the best way to achieve this?
If the specific VM exists before the current pipeline, you can consider installing self-hosted agent there.
To do CI/CD using Azure pipelines, we need at least one agent. If we use microsoft-hosted agent, it will provide one fresh VM for us to run jobs. Since you need to run the script in your own specific VM, I suggest using self-hosted agent. You can follow the steps here to install one agent into your own VM. (The steps are quite easy and only cost several minutes)
After making your VM a self-hosted agent, the pipeline will call your VM to run the jobs. Now your original issue turns into how to run JMeter locally with command-line. See similar issues here: Five Ways To Launch a JMeter Test without Using the JMeter GUI and Run .jmx file through command line ....
1.So now we can use a command-line task in pipeline to run the JMeter related commands shared in the similar topics above. And these jobs are done in your specific VM.
2.I'm not sure which location you want to copy the jtl to, but you can use Azure File Copy task to copy files to Microsoft Azure storage blobs or virtual machines (VMs). Or a simple copy/xcopy command in your command line task to copy files to another location in same machine. (Specific VM)
Hope all above helps :)
I have Use following Task in Azure CD pipeline.
"Run Taurus" Task is as following.
Where "_WM WebClient TestArtifacts" is git/Azure Repo directory where .jmx file kept(in Code).
In my current organization we are using Azure DevOps Server (on-prem) to release our products. The current setup is that we have a bunch of build and release agents running on a set of VMs.
The servers that we actually release to are different machines than the ones running the release and build agents, therfor we end up using alot of "PowerShell on target Machine" tasks during the release to configure and setup dependencies for our products.(asp.net websites in this case)..
However.. what I find strange is that due to this setup we cant really utilize other tasks to setup our environment/target-machines. For instance, lets say that we would like to use the "extract files"-task, then this would not be possible since the extraction would happen in our agent and not in our environment/target Machine.
Are we missing something or are you actually supposed to basically only use the "PowerShell on target-machine"-task for such a scenario?
You are right, most of the tasks are running on the machine of where the agent is installed. if you want to run the agent in one VM and deploy with this agent to another VM you can use out-of-the-box with the PowerShell on target machine or Copy files to remote machine, or SSH tasks.
But, in the marketplace you can find many tasks that can do things to remote machines, include zip or unzip files.
If you can it's really recommended to install the agents on your target machines.
It doesn't look like this is possible but is there a way to use VSTS Continuous Delivery and deploy to a server outside Azure?
Sure. VSTS Continuous Delivery can deploy to anything that can run the VSTS agent or anything that can be targetted from a VSTS agent. Basically you have two options:
Let the VSTS (hosted) agent communicate directly to your deployment target. Out of the box tasks can use MsDeploy or WinRM. There are also tasks for Octopus Deploy, AWS and other systems available through the Marketplace. Powershell has options to connect directly to other systems and you can use many different protocols from a powershell script.
Install the VSTS agent on your target machine (or network). The VSTS agent can be downloaded and installed onto the target server. That way you have full local access to the target machine and can simply copy the files to the target folder straight from the Release Management artefacts. By installing a VSTS agent in you local network, you can use the options listed under 1 to bypass firewalls that might be blocking the hosted agent.
Have written multiple Powershell scripts to take backup of AZure API management service. One script calls another and exports all the products and properties to my local machine.
I want to automate this process of backing up everything directly to Bitbucket. To achieve this i have configured Jenkins which is running on a CentOS server but, i don't know how to automate things using it?
I tried installing the Powershell Plugin on Jenkins but as i have multiple scripts written having dependency on one another, i just can't paste the whole thing as it is and run.
so is there a way i can run this multiple codes on Jenkins Powershell plugin instead of composing one single code and then run it?
Second thing, should Jenkins be installed on my local machine rather than on CentOS server in order to achieve this?
Or
if Jenkins has a plugin to link with my Azure account and export services to Bitbucket? (with Powershell codes out of picture)
Is there any other tool / alternative which is little less complicated?
I'm trying to use TFS 2015.1 on premise to build a CI pipeline for our dev & uat. I've created a vNext CI build, which builds fine. But when I want to add a deploy step for on prem IIS server, I only then see Azure Web Deployment options.
Ideally I wanted to add a step which uses the existing deploy (MS Deploy) profiles, which I'm able to use from VS2015 directly, using 'Publish'. However I see no option to do so.
How can I deploy the latest build to internal dev servers (not Azure)? I would like to use the MS Deploy option, unless there's a better way of doing it?
The fact that their is no option to starts to make me think there's probably a different way to accomplish it!
Thanks.
If you're able to upgrade to TFS 2015.2, web-based Release Management came out with it that works similarly to Build vNext with flexible and open-source tasks. You can also customize tasks.
Here's a link for IIS Web App Deployment from the vso-agent-task's GitHub repo where Microsoft stores updated versions of their tasks that you can download for web-based Build and Release Management.
I'll be publishing a blog about web-based RM with TFS 2015 Update 2 or VSTS on my website in the next few weeks. To give you an idea though, the starting point (for a web application) is a folder in your web project called WebDeploy (no significance - any name will do) that contains a PowerShell DSC script that configures the server, deploys the web files and then replaces any tokenised configs. To give you an idea see this post about how to use DSC to configure servers. (Only covers part of the final script though!) The next steps are:
In the build hub create a Website artifact - containing your web files and DSC script.
In the release hub for an environment use a Windows Machine File Copy task to deploy the artifact to a temp folder on the target node.
Then use a PowerShell on Target Machines task to execute the DSC script. After configuring the server the script copies the web files to their proper location, sorts out config using xReleaseManagement and cleans up the WebDeploy folder.
See this article for general details of the route I'm taking, but watch out as it has some errors eg the firewall instructions are incomplete (file and print sharing through the firewall needs to be enabled).
I can thoroughly recommend the PowerShell DSC route - I've had a few glitches but on the whole it feels very productive and the right way to be going.