I have an on-prem EF6 Web API 2 project in a testing environment, and now I need to set up a developer environment. For now I'm limited to an on-prem, non CI/CD, single developer team. We'll eventually move over to an Azure, VSTS, CI, Windows 10 Enterprise Store environment.
My question is: Should I create a separate Dev Web API 2 project and copy/past/import my models and controllers into the Test environment project when I'm ready to move from Dev to Test? Or should I use one project file with multiple EF6 Context/Configuration migrations for both Dev and Test remote Web API's?
I could just use IIS Express for my separate Dev Web API 2 Project instead of having two remote web api's?
I'm concerned with ensuring that my Test Web API gets accurately updated when I release. If I go with the single project, multiple Context, and multiple remote Web API's path, then I can simply Add-Migration, Update-Database, and Publish to the correct entities depending on the environment which I'm targeting.
Thanks.
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Forgive me for asking a stupid question. I am from IT Infrastructure background & have been asked to create CI/CD pipelines based on my recent learnings on DevOps.
We have couple of applications whose source code is currently in TFS 2013 & those apps are written in ASP.NET C# language. Now, requirement is to migrate the source code from TFS to Azure Repos (Azure DevOps services) & further create a CI/CD pipeline.
Now for demo purposes, customer is asking us to do the deployment (i.e. Release pipeline) on a test server which is a plain windows 2012 OS without any SQL & IIS for both of these applications. Is that possible & how could we achieve the results to confirm release pipeline is funcioning properly?
In my opinion, it wont work as there is no application infra/configuration done for those applications on that plain test server. I guess we actually need a ready dev/stage environment which is replica of production to do the testing of release pipeline for those applications. Am I correct?
Just need expert advise for confirmation so I communicate the same to customer.
Azure DevOps Pipelines use an agent to perform the deployments. You can run the agent entirely in the cloud when deploying to Azure resources. You can also install an agent locally. Follow this link and scroll down to read about self-hosted agents. This is how you can deploy to your test instance from the pipeline.
Now, what you deploy there may require additional software be installed. You say it's an application in C#. Cool. Now, what's it do? Is it a windows program? Then just having the server there, with an agent installed, is all you need. Is it a web program? Then, yeah, it's going to need an IIS (or whatever) instance available somewhere to deploy to. Is it a database program? Then, yeah, it's going to need a database instance to deploy to. There's nothing magical about having a VM or a machine somewhere. All the same rules have to apply. There has to be an OS, drives, memory, and yes, supporting services depending on the needs of the application.
However, using a local machine instead of a hosted one, that works fine. Just follow the instructions in the link above.
I'm new in VSTS and I'm in this case, I have a single solution built on Visual Studio 2015. It contains 7 or 8 projects that reference each others, I need only to build and release 3 project of them on Azure VM via Visual Studio Team Services so the question is what is the best approach to do this?
Clarification: the projects that I want to deploy are 2 aspnet web sites and a windows communication foundation library.
In my iis I have the following configuration:
Mysite (the root site with the following applications inside)
RPT (other web site)
WCF (wcf library)
This is my current VSTS build definition and with the following artifacts:
But I can only select one zip to deploy:
I do not know if this is the correct approach.
To deploy the three projects to Azure VM, you need to add different tasks in your release pipeline to deploy the three projects separately.
For now, you are using an IIS Web App Deploy task you deploy one project. Then you can add other task to deploy other two projects separately.
I am trying to set up one of my ASP.net projects for continuous integration with TFS. Amongst my requirements, I need to set up TFS so that each time there is a successful build with passing tests, the ASP.net code should be deployed to my development web server.
What I have done so far is I have set up a private agent behind my firewall (so that the agent has a "line of sight" to the development web server. I've set up a build that runs all unit tests, and I have the gated check-in setup up so that the build is rejected if the tests don't pass.
I can see that the build artifact is created by the agent, but I am stuck with trying to figure out how to actually deploy the artifact to the development web server.
I have my publish profiles in Visual Studio, but I'm guessing that those are useless in TFS.
You can refer to below link and follow the steps mentioned in the article to deploy the artifact to the web server:
End to End Walkthrough: Deploying Web Applications Using Team Build
and Release Management
Deploy to a Windows Virtual Machine
Visual Studio Team Services Release Management IIS Web Deployment
vnext
For the publish profiles, you can pass parameters into MSBuild during the building in TFS, eg : /p:DeployOnBuild=true;PublishProfile=MyProfile
Reference below threads to use the Publish Profiles:
TFS 2017 publish with PublishProfile
Build and Deploy a Web Application with TFS 2017 using Web Deploy Package
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.
Trying to make my life easier, Currently we have 4 developers working in Visual Studio 2012 and we are using TFS 2012 for source control. The project we work on is a multi-tenant web application (single source directory with multiple dbs) that is a mixture of legacy, asp and vb6 com components, coupled with new C# code. We use TFS for source control and for managing User Stories and Bugs. Because of the way our site works it can not be ran or debugged locally only on the server.
Source Control is currently setup with a separate branch for each developer that's working directory is mapped to a shared network path on the dev server that has a web site pointed to it in IIS. Dev01-Dev05 etc. The developers work on projects in their branch test it using their dev website, then check in changes to their own branch and merge those into the trunk. The trunk's work space is mapped to the main dev website so that the developers can test their changes against the other customer's dev domains to test against customizations and variances in functionality based on the specific dbs the are connected to.
Very long explanation but basically each dev has a branch and a site, that are then merged into the trunk with its own site.
In order to deploy our staging server:
I compile the trunk's website via a bat file on the server
Run a windows app I built to query TFS for changesets associated with
specific WorkItems in a certain status, and copy all the files for
those changesets from the publish folder to a deployment folder.
Run another bat file on the server to use RedGate's Deployment Manager
to create a package from those new files
Go to the DM site on our network to create and deploy that release (haven't been able to get the command line tools to work for this, so I have to do it manually)
Run any SQL scripts that have been saved off in Folders that match ticket numbers on each database (10 or so customer dbs) to support the release
I have tried using TFS automated build stuff and never really got it to build the website correctly. Played around with Cruise Control also with little success. Using a mishmash of skunk works projects to do this is very time consuming and unreliable at best.
My perfect scenario would be:
Gated Checkin, Attempt build/publish every time a developer merges into the trunk, rejects and notifies developer if the build fails.
End of the day collect the TFS Items of a certain status and deploys files associated with them to the staging site
Deploy SQL scripts for those TFS items across all the customer dbs in staging
Eventually* run automated regression UI tests, create new WorkItems or emails to devs if failed
Update TFS WorkItems to new state so QA/Customers know their items are ready to test in our staging environment
Send report of what items were deployed successfully
How can I get here so that I am not spending hours preparing and deploying releases to staging and eventually production? Pretty open to potential solutions, things that would be hard to change would be the source control we are using, can't really switch to subversion or something else so we are pretty stuck with TFS.
Thanks
Went back in and started trying to get TFS to build/publish my web solution. I was able to get a build to complete successfully. adding msbuild argument /p:DeployOnBuild=True and setting the msbuild platform to x86 seemed to do the trick on that.
Then I found https://github.com/red-gate/deployment-manager-tfs which gives you a build process template to do the package and deployment using the redgate tools. After playing with that for a bit I finally got it to create, package and deploy my build to our staging environment.
Next up will be to modify the template to run some custom scripts to collect only the correct items to deploy, deploy all the sql files and then to set the workitems to the appropriate statuses after completion.
Really detailed description of your process. Thanks for sharing!
I believe you can set up TFS to have gated check-in on a single branch, which if you can setup on trunk would make sure that the merges built successfully. That could trigger msbuild, if you can get that working or a custom build job.
If you can get that working then you'd be able to use that trunk code as the artifact to send to Deployment Manager. That avoids having to assemble the files for deployment through the TFS change sets, as you'd be confident that the trunk could always build.
Are you using Deployment Manager to deploy the database from source control as well as the application?
That could be a way to further automate the process. SQL Source Control and SQL CI allow you to source control the structure of a database, keep a database up to date on each check-in, and run database unit tests. They also produce database packages for Deployment Manager, so you can deploy a release that contains both the application and the database.
If you want to send me the command you're using in step 4 to deploy the release using Deployment Manager I can help out with that. The commands I use are:
DeploymentManager.exe --create-release --server=http://localhost:81 --project="Project Name" --apiKey=XXXXXXXXXXX--version=1.1
DeploymentManager.exe --deploy-release --server=http://localhost:81 --project="Project Name" --apiKey=XXXXXXXXXXX--version=1.1 --deployto=CI-Environment-Name
That will create a release version 1.1 using the latest available packages for that project. You can optionally specify the package to be used when creating the release with
--packageversion=<package name>=<version>
--packageversion="application=1.5