We have a release definition which delivers a bunch of asp.net core services along with an Angular app.
Most service are not updated very often so the question is how to compare an artifact version with already deployed into an environment and skip if the latest version had been deployed before?
We have multiple environments in the pipeline.
I dont think it is possible, at least natively, you can calculate file hashes and dont deploy if they match, another option would be using path triggers to filter when an app is build. for example, your directory structure looks like this:
root
|--app1
|--app2
etc
you can define path filters in your yaml build like this:
trigger:
paths:
include:
- app1/*
- sharedlibs/* (if you have them)
this way build will only trigger if there are any changes to files in those directories
You can add additional release environment to check current artifact version through PowerShell (e.g. Build.SourceVersion, check variables in release), then fail task if there was already successfully released.
For Staging environment, choose After environment option and select previous environment.
On the other hand, since you have mentioned most service are not updated very often, you could use 4c74356b41's suggestion to filter build, to only build and release the changes you want.
Related
I have a continuously triggered Azure DevOps release definition that deploys a compiled Angular app to a web server and also runs Cypress e2e tests. The Cypress tests must run against the source code, so that means I need an artifact that is able to reference the same commit that was used to create the compiled app.
I created a GitHub artifact that gets the source code, but I can't figure out how to automatically change the branch/commit to whatever was used for the compiled app (it could be any branch and the names are not known ahead of time). Azure forces me to enter a hard-coded branch name and it does not accept wildcards or variables.
If I could simply use the variable ${Release.Artifacts.{alias}.SourceBranchName} for the default branch, I think I'd achieve my goal. Since Azure doesn't allow this, is there an alternative approach that accomplishes the same thing?
Note 1: The "Default version" dropdown has an option "Specify at the time of release creation", but that is intended for manual releases and can't be used for triggered ones, so no luck there.
Note 2: I looked into publishing the source code as an artifact, but it currently has almost 70,000 files and it adds more than an hour to the build step, so that also is not an option.
When you use the Release Pipeline artifacts, you are not able to set the pipeline variable in the Default branch field. This field only supports hard-coded.
is there an alternative approach that accomplishes the same thing?
The variable:$(Release.Artifacts.{alias}.SourceBranchName) can be used in the Release Pipeline agent job.
Workaround:
You can remove the Github artifacts and then add a Command Line task/PowerShell task/ Bash task to run the git command to clone the target repo.
For example:
git clone -b $(Release.Artifacts.{alias}.SourceBranchName) GithubRepoURL
PowerShell sample:
In this case, the script will use the same branch as Build Artifacts to checkout the source code.
I am trying to create a release pipeline in Azure DevOps. We already have a functioning build pipeline that works well, it is able to package the build with VSBuild and publish it as an artifact. Then in the release pipeline I am using an IIS Deployment job (which includes IIS Manage and IIS Deploy tasks) and it gets that artifact to deploy.
The problem is that we already have a publish profile (.pubxml) that should take care of pretty much everything the IIS Deployment is doing (at least as far I as I understand it). So to me it seems I have two options that don't require me to refactor the project configuration itself.
I can try to mimic the settings on the IIS Deployment job to match our .pubxml as closely as possible and manually applying any changes that aren't doable through the task settings. Obviously this is not ideal as that would require us to update both when ever we make changes and it introduces a large chance of the pipeline breaking down over time.
I can scrap the idea of using IIS Deployment and just use a VSBuild task that uses arguments /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=Staging. This doesn't seem like best practices because it means my release pipeline isn't passing a build package to deploy, it is just creating a new one at each stage.
So is there a better option that would allow me to utilize the package I created with VSBuild and the .pubxml configuration together in a deploy? If that isn't possible then are either of my options the "correct" way to handle my situation or am I just missing another method of deployment I could use?
Thank you for any help or insight you can provide. Please let me know if there is any more information I can give that would be useful.
You can try using publish settings file (*.publishsettings) for your IIS deployment.
A publish settings file (.publishsettings) is different than a publishing profile (.pubxml) created in Visual Studio. A publish settings file is created by IIS or Azure App Service, or it can be manually created, and then it can be imported into Visual Studio.
To view more details, you can see:
Publish an application to IIS by importing publish settings in Visual Studio
Deploy your app to a folder, IIS, Azure, or another destination
So unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way I can achieve everything I wanted in this. The publish profiles are required for when we build the project so without making changes to how we configure those I need to build the project whenever I want to deploy. Ultimately I went with option #2. I essentially just copied most of the build tasks used in the testing pipeline and placed those in the release pipeline with a few modified commands to actually deploy the build once finished. It all seems to work just fine but still doesn't feel like best practices. If I am missing something please let me know and I will make updates as appropriate.
My question is about maintainability of vNext/Octopus processes vs XAML based processes. Or rather about the impossibility to maintain them sanely leading me to believe we are doing something terribly wrong.
Given:
Microsoft pushes to phase out its TFS XAML builds in favour of the vNext builds
Octopus Deploy is a popular deployment automation framework
We have many XAML based builds, but starting to port to vNext
The deployments are automated with Octopus Deploy
Concretely, we have three kinds of builds going on in QA:
Old XAML based compilation builds producing artifacts to be deployed
Ultimately just builds the code, zips it and places in a well-known location
New vNext compilation builds producing artifacts to be deployed
Same as above
Deployment builds
XAML based build definition per deployment environment. This is the source of truth for the particular deployment, containing all the configuration URLs, connection strings, certificate thumbprints, etc.. The build definition has over 100 build parameters. Each time a new environment is setup we clone an existing XAML build definition and change the parameters.
This build unpacks the build artifact, generates all the web/app config files based on the configuration parameters and kicks off Octopus Deploy with a lot of parameters using octo.exe and waiting for the end
Octopus Deploy process
Creates 3 packages from the build artifact previously unpacked by the XAML build to match three areas of deployment - web farm, background job engine cluster and the database
Delivers the relevant packages to the relevant tentacles.
The tentacles unpack and setup their respective packages
So, if we have 50 deployment environments, then we have 50 XAML deployment builds, each capturing the context of the respective environment. But the XAML deployment build delegates the deployment job to Octopus and here we are forced to have 50 Octopus projects - one per deployment.
Why is it so? We examined the option of having just one Octopus Project, but what would be the Release versions of such project? In order for us to be able to navigate amongst the gazillion releases, the release version must include:
The build version of the deployed code, e.g. 55.0.18709.3
The name of the deployment environment, e.g. atwfm
Using the example above this gives us 55.0.18709.3-atwfm, but sometimes we want to deploy the same build artifact in the same deployment environment twice. But the only Octopus project would already have the release 55.0.18709.3-atwfm, so how to deploy 55.0.18709.3 in atwfm again, without deleting the already existing release?
We could not find a workaround and so, we have Octopus project per deployment.
THIS IS ABSOLUTELY CRAZY because Octopus projects are a pain to update. Suppose we need to add a step - go do it in 50 projects. There are great advises on the Internet to use automation to edit multiple projects. Not ideal at all.
vNext, BTW, has the same problem. If I am to port the existing XAML builds to vNext I will end up with 50 vNext deployment builds. If I decide to add a step, I need to do it in all the 50 builds!!!
Note, that XAML builds do not have this problem (they have many others, though), because their the process is separate from the parameters. I can modify the workflow once and all the XAML builds are now updated with the new process change.
My question is - how do people work with vNext and Octopus, because our process drives me crazy. There must be a better way.
EDIT 1
I would like to clarify. We sometimes want to deploy the same build artifacts twice. We are not recompiling them and reusing the same version. No. We already have the build artifacts handy with the build version baked inside the artifact. We may want to deploy it the second time into the same environment because, for example, some databases in that environment have been misconfigured and now this is fixed and we need to redeploy. This does not mean we can rerun the already existing Octopus release, because the fix may involve tweaking the deployment parameters of the respective XAML deployment build definition. Hence we may be forced to restart the XAML deployment build, which never compiles code.
EDIT 2
First of all, why do we drive the deployment from TFS XAML builds rather than from Octopus? Historic reasons. We did not have Octopus at first. The deployment was done by our ad hoc code. When we introduced Octopus we decided to keep the XAML deploymenet builds for two reasons:
To save the cost of migrating all the XAML deployment builds with all the gazillion deployment parameters to Octopus. Maybe it was a wrong decision, maybe we could have automated the migration.
Because TFS has better facility to display test results. The deployment may end with deployment smoke tests and their results has to be published somewhere. We do not see how Octopus can help us publish the results, TFS can.
Why would one redeploy? For example, one of the deployment parameters is certificate thumbprint. When the certificate is renewed, this parameter must be changed (we do have automation for updating XAML build parameters). But often we discover that it was already deployed with wrong thumbprint. So, we fix the deployment and redeploy. Or, we discover some strange behavior of the deployed application and wish to redeploy with some extra tracing/debugging features.
There is a lot to unpack here, but I'll give it a go.
TL;DR It's the way you version the releases that's causing you all the pain. Change that and everything else will fall in to place
Lets start at the end and work backwards.
Octopus Deploy has a concept of Environments. This means that you can Deploy the same project to multiple environments and use Octopus's scoping mechanism to manage environment specific configuration.
So using your example.
Creates 3 packages from the build artifact previously unpacked by the
XAML build to match three areas of deployment - web farm, background
job engine cluster and the database
I set up an Environment in Octopus for each of your 50 Environments. (I'll use 3 environments in the example to keep it simple, but the principles apply no matter how many environments you have)
In my Dev Environment I have a single server so I create an environment called "Dev" and add the tentacle for that specific server. Then I tag the tentacle with the deployment type "Web", "Job", "Database"
I then set up a test environment which has 3 servers so I create the Environment and add the 3 servers. I then tag each tentacle with the deployment type "Web", "Job", "Database"
Finally I set up the Production environment. This has 5 web servers, 1 job server and 1 database server. I add all 7 tentacles to the environment, and tag them appropriately.
Now I only need 1 project to deploy to all 3 environments. In my project I have 3 steps.
Step 1 Deploy Web Site
Step 2 Deploy Jobs
Step 3 Deploy database
I can tag each of these steps to say what kind of tentacle I want to deploy to. Now when I run the deployment the link between the tags on the step, and the tags on the tentacle mean Octopus knows where to deploy the code.
Variables: Your variables can be scoped to an environment. So for example if your dev environment database connection string is dev.database.net/Instance and your test environment database connection string is test.Database.net/Instance then you can scope these in the variables section of the project. If your DNS is consitant with your environment names you could even use some of the built in variables to make adding environments more easy. i.e. ${Octopus.Environment.Name}.Database.net/Instance
Releases and version numbers: So here is where I think your problem lies. Adding the environment name to the release and trying to create multiple releases with the same version is basically causing you all of the pain.
Using the example above this gives us 55.0.18709.3-atwfm, but
sometimes we want to deploy the same build artifact in the same
deployment environment twice. But the only Octopus project would
already have the release 55.0.18709.3-atwfm, so how to deploy
55.0.18709.3 in atwfm again, without deleting the already existing release?
There are a couple of things here. In Octopus you can easily deploy again from the UI, however it sounds like you're rebuilding the artifact and trying to create a new release with the same version number. Don't do this! Each new build should have a distinct and unique build number / release number.
The principle I follow is "build once deploy many"
When you create a release it requires a version number, this release then flows through the environments. So I build my code and it gets a versions number 55.0.18709.3 then I deploy it to Dev. When the deployment has been verified I then want to "Promote" the release to test I can do this from within Octopus or I can get TFS to do this.
So I promote 55.0.18709.3 to test and then on to prod. If I need to know which release is in which environment, Octopus tells me this via the dashboard or API.
Finally I can "Orchestrate" the flow of releases through my environments using Build v.next.
So my end to end process looks something like.
Build vNext Build
Compile
Run Unit Tests
Package output
Publish package
build vNext Release
Call Octopus to create the release passing in the version number
Optionally deploy the release to the first environment on your way to live
I now have everything I need in Octopus to deploy to ANY environment with a single project and my environment specific configuration.
I can either "Deploy" the release to a specific environment or "Promote" the release from one environment to another. This can be done easily from within the Octopus UI
Or I can create a "Promote" using the Octopus plugin in TFS and use that to orchestrate the promotion of code through the environments.
Octopus Terminology.
Create release - This pulls together the Artifacts and Release number in Octopus to create an Immutable thing which will be deployed to one of more environments.
Deploy release - The act of pushing your code to a specific environment.
Promote release - Once the code has been deployed in to a single environment, it can them be promoted in to other environments
If you have a specific sequence of environments then you can use the "Lifecycles" feature of Octopus to enforce that workflow. but that's a topic for another day!
EDIT1 Response
I don't think the edit changes my answer, you can re-deploy the same release many times as you like. what you cannot do is create a new release with the same version number. You might want to decouple these steps could you add some more detail about what changes in the XAML build? You can change variables in a release, you can update them in octopus and then redeploy
EDIT 2 Response
That makes things clearer. I think you need to take the hit and migrate the parameters to Octopus. It's variable management is much better than XAML builds and although build vNext is comparable to Octopus it makes more sense to have the config in Octopus. As XAML builds are on their way out, it makes sense to move this stuff now. Whilst it might be a lot of work, at the end you'll have a much smother workflow and you can really take advantage of the power of Octopus.
The Test results point. I agree this is better suited to build vNext, so at this point you will be using build vNext as your Orchestrator and Octopus Deploy as your release management tool.
The process would look something like
Build vNext
Compile code.
Run Unit tests
Run Octopack
Publish packages
Call Octopus and Create release
Call Octopus to Deploy to "Dev"
Run Smoke tests
Run Integration Tests
Call "Selenium" to run Run UI tests
Call Octopus to Promote release to "Test"
Run Smoke tests
Run Integration Tests
Call "Selenium" to run Run UI tests
Call Octopus to Promote release to "Production" (Perhaps with a manual innervation)
Run Smoke tests
Run Integration Tests
Call "Selenium" to run Run UI tests
I have a .NET Core project that is auto-built in Appveyor and deployed to Nuget. By default, every successful build causes a new Nuget release.
However, there are many cases when a new release is meaningless because the library's actual code has not changed:
Readme updated
Unit tests added
Appveyor configuration changed
Other cases
It is possible to configure the build so that Nuget publishing only runs if there are changes in the actual code (for example, in folder X)?
There are a few options.
Commit filtering. Note that with it the whole build, not just deployment will be skipped if nothing in folder x changed. You may need a build without deployment at least when unit tests added. As a workaround consider adding separate AppVeyor project which will build and deploy only if folder x changed and keep current project to build every time, but not deploy
Inspect changed files with script. Please check this sample on how to check those files if you use GitHub. So if you see that files in folder x changed, you can set some custom environment variable (lets say you call it deploy_nuget) to true, and use it with a conditional deployment.
First attempt at automated build and continuous deployment so any process suggestions / improvements are welcome.
I have a repository with different build definitions. One for each of the following: database project, api, and web. (Will add more later for etl / reports) Each build has a filter so it only builds if code in a specific path has been changed.
Currently I have separate releases using continuous deployment for each build. So when the code changes, it builds that auto deploys. This works, but really isn't practical because of dependencies.
What I am looking to do is have one release definition that includes all build artifacts. Then have deployment phases that only run conditionally if a specific build artifact was created (something in that project changed). This way all builds / releases don't run every time, but are tied together when there are related changes.
I am going down the path of trying to created a custom condition on the deployment phase, but can't seem to figure out a way to make this work. I appreciate any help with this.
I have a repository with different build definitions. One for each of
the following: database project, api, and web. (Will add more later
for etl / reports) Each build has a filter so it only builds if code
in a specific path has been changed
Path filters are not to be used in your situation.
If you see Microsoft's git repo,
They have all their codebase from the Windows and Devices Group (WDG) in one big repo. Each root folder is a separate product and completely unrelated to the rest. (eg. Xbox, HoloLens, Windows OS, etc).
Path filters makes sense here because if I git push code to Xbox, I don't want Hololens code also to be built.
Web / DB / API projects all need to be built together, packaged together and deployed together.
I am assuming the project uses .NET stack.
Keep the DB, Web and API projects are in the same solution. Create a single build definition that builds the solution and create multiple artifacts(dacpac, webdeploy package etc.) by adding multiple publish artifacts step.
See screenshot of a build with multiple artifacts.
Link the artifacts from this build to the Release Definition and you should be able to deploy.