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
Related
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 getting my first VSTS build and release definitions setup.
Test server destination, on prem
project is using VS 2017 professional
Earlier I setup a private agent for doing the build, following this.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/build-release/actions/agents/v2-windows?view=vsts
The agent installed fine and I can see it from build & release / agent pools
However, have now switched to using a hosted agent for that so I can remove the need to install visual studio on a test server.
Now I want to deploy the build to my test server, which is on premises. Do I need yet another agent or can I use the one I setup already. In other words are build agents separate from release agents? The agent I setup earlier is running as a service.
The build agent can be used in VSTS build and release, also the deployment group agent is configuring with build agent too.
You don’t need to setup another build/release agent, there are many tasks to deploy app to another server, such as IIS Web App Deployment Using WinRM, PowerShell on Target machine, Windows Machine File Copy.
The build and release agents are the same, but you have to install an on-premise agent to deploy your projects in your network. Is not that you can not use the hosted agent, but you would have to use WinRM and open you network, which may not be a good idea.
After you installed your on-premise agent, you don't have to install VS on the machine to run tests. You can add the following task to your release.
I am using VSTS Release management to deploy artifacts to IIS websites. I have several Web applications and web services to be deployed. So, i am trying to figure out what sort of tasks that best fits my situation.
I have created a build definition with Visual Studio Build Task for projects as this one:
which works fine but i need to add a task for copying the artifacts Under IIS Website Directory.
The other approach is to use IIS web deployment as a task in Release definition, so I created the build definition as:
However, it expects a Publish Profile (the build fails because it can't find it). I don't need to create a publish profile for each project in the application because this would be too much work.
Is there is a workaround for that or what is preferred approach for this?
You can update your build definition to generate a web deployment package and upload it to artifacts. And then in Release Management, add a task to run "projectname.deploy.cmd" in the deployment package to deploy it to your IIS server. Refer to this link for details: How to: Install a Deployment Package Using the deploy.cmd File Created by Visual Studio.
And you can also enable FTP Publishing on your IIS server and add a task in your release to publish the artifacts via FTP. You may need this task:
FTP Uploader.
My Continuous Delivery with TFS / VSTS – Server Configuration and Application Deployment with Release Management blog post (with reference to some previous posts) has all the details you need for deploying your artefacts to target nodes using Windows Machine File Copy tasks then use PowerShell on Target Machines tasks to get them in to correct locations and to do token replacement and anything else that's required.
I would recommend using PowerShell DSC so that IIS is properly configured before deployment but that's not required. Where possible for web apps I favour keeping things very simple by creating artefacts that contain all the web files that are needed for a particular folder and then just using plain xcopy for the deployment.
If you need more control you can also use my MSDeploy VSTS extension to deploy a MSDeploy package
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rschiefer.MSDeployAllTheThings
https://dotnetcatch.com/2016/04/20/msdeployallthethings-vststfs-extension-is-public/
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.
We have Continuous Integration setup through TFS 2012.
Requirement:
Wanted the release build to be deployed on mulitple servers as a part of the CI. We need to do a xCopy of the files onto the server folders.
On TFS with Azure there seems to be a facility to publish it directly onto the server (http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/publishing-with-tfs/)
There-in it uses 'AzureContinuousDeployment.11.xaml' as the Build Process Template.
Wanted to check if anybody has tried similar publishing for custom/local servers, maybe using Custom deployment template, etc.
You likely want to create Standard Environments for Automated Deployment and Testing which you can do out of the box with TFS 2010. TFS 2012 and TFS 2013.
You use the "Lab Centre" which is part of the Microsoft Test Manager product to configure Environments that consist of one or more target machines.
You then use the Lab Default Template to push a build output to the target servers and execute a script to complete the install. You can even have your Integration and UI tests executed as part of the same actions.
If you are looking for more integrated Release Management with Team Foundation Server then you should look to Octopus Deploy as a good way to go all the way to production.
We use it with many of our customers and it works a treat...
From my understanding TFS 2012 ships with a Lab Deployment template. You configure the lab definitions of which servers are involved and then configure the deployments to those servers. Also used for hooking Test Manager in to run unit tests in the lab.