I code PowerShell, and save it to my VSTS account.
But when I code costumer specific Powershell script, I write them in my VS on my computer, then download them/the file from the customer server via web.
Is there any lightweight client or PowerShell script to download the latest version of a given file or folder from a private VSTS repository?
So I don't have to install anything on the customer server, and I can easily update the local file with a saved script.
It's a TFVC repository, not GIT repository if that makes a difference.
Neno Loje has built a small tool that can download one or more files directly from TFVC. It needs a couple of Client Object Model files, which are taken from the new TFS Client Object Model nuget files.
You can find it here:
https://blogs.msmvps.com/vstsblog/2011/03/14/download-files-from-tfs-version-control-and-set-the-file-last-access-timestamp-to-the-file-s-last-check-in-time/
The TFS 2015/2017 version will work against VSTS as well as pretty much any TFS server out there regardless of the version.
Alternatively, you could use the TFS Cross Platform Command Line, as long as Java is available on the target server
Related
Is it possible to browse the file system in Azure Devops. Like when using SSH to connect to a server? Or if it's possible to browse using Explorer.
It would really simplify things if I could see what files were created and where they end up after builds.
Now I don't feel I have any way to know which files ended up where after the builds are done.
Thanks!
I don`t think so. You may add build steps (Build and release tasks - Utility) and create cmd or bath file to browse the file system of the build servers.
As alternative way, you may use your own build server (Self-hosted agents) on Azure VMs and you will have the full control.
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.
First, I'm a TFS novice. I have a situation where I'm running TFS, and want to interact with a domain outside our environment. The destination server environment does not want to establish any trusts due to security\confidentiality reasons. I was thinking of using a BuildServer or second TFS server in the remote environment to accept the files from the (local) source TFS.
For anyone else looking to do this, I found out there is a way to do it, however it's certainly not a plug-n-play.
The steps would be:
Using the TFS API, write a solution to watch for check-in actions. When one is found, wait until the action is completed then copy all items to a temporary location.
This temporary is actually a secure FTP location that would send the files to the client site.
Once on the destination client, a folder watcher scans for changes.
When the FTP process is complete, a TFS API solution application call is made to check in the files to the destination TFS.
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
I have an MVC4 + EF4.0 .NET 4.5 project (say, MyProject) I'm able to run the project locally just fine. When I FTP deploy it to Azure Websites (not cloud service) it runs fine too. However, if I do a GIT deploy, the site 'runs' for the most part until it does some EF5.0 database operations. I get an exception Unable to load the specified metadata resource.
Upon debugging I noticed that if I:
GIT deploy the entire MVC4 project (as before)
FTP in and then replace bin\MyProject.dll with the bin\MyProject.dll file that I just built locally (Windows 8 x64, VS2012, Oct'12 Azure tools) after the GIT push (i.e. same source)
then the Azure hosted website runs just fine (even the EF5.0 database functionality portion).
The locally built .dll is about 5KB larger than the Azure GIT publish built one and both are 'Release' mode. It's obvious that the project as built after the GIT push (inside Azure) is being built differently than as on my own PC. I checked the portal and it's set to .NET 4.5. I'm also GIT pushing the entire solution folder (with just one project) and not just small bits and pieces.
When I load the locally built as well as the remotely built MyProject.dll files, I noticed the following difference(FrameworkDisplayName)
local: System.Runtime.Versioning.TargetFrameworkAttribute(".NETFramework,Version=v4.5", FrameworkDisplayName = ".NET Framework 4.5"),
remote: System.Runtime.Versioning.TargetFrameworkAttribute(".NETFramework,Version=v4.5", FrameworkDisplayName = ""),
Anyone knows why this is happening and what the fix might be?
Yes, this is a bug that will be fixed in the next release. The good news is that it's possible to work around it today:
First, you need to use a custom deployment script, per this post.
Then you need to change the MSBuild command line in the custom script per this issue.
Credit goes to David above for the pointers and hints. I voted him up but I'll also post the exact solution to the issue here. I've edited my original post because I found there was a major bug that I didn't notice until I started from scratch (moved GIT servers). So here is the entire process, worked for me.
Download Node.JS (it's needed even for .NET projects because the GIT deploy tools use it)
Install the azure-cli tool (open regular command prompt => npm install azure-cli -g)
In the command prompt, cd to the root of your repository (cd \projects\MyRepoRoot)
In there, type azure site deploymentscript --aspWAP PathToMyProject\MyProject.csproj -s PathToMySolution.sln (obviously adjust the paths as needed)
This will create the .deployment and deploy.cmd files
Now edit the deploy.cmd file, find the line starting with %MSBUILD_PATH% (will be just one)
Insert the /t:Build parameter. For example:
[Before] %MSBUILD_PATH% <blah blah> /verbosity:m /t:pipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder
[After] %MSBUILD_PATH% <blah blah> /verbosity:m /t:Build /t:pipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder)
Push to GIT (check the GIT output if everything went ok)
Browse to your website and confirm it works!
I'll be glad when it's fixed in the next revision so we won't maintain the build script