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/
Related
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.
I have a website which is the combination of 3 separate artifacts.
The base files for Sitecore (a CMS, best practice is to keep it separate from your own code repo), this artifact is just files
The custom logic for the web site (.net) which is compiled into a web deploy package
An additional module that we only release to the dev server. This artifact is just files (2 dll's and a config file)
At the moment to deploy to our dev server I have 3 IIS Web App Deploy tasks to release to IIS on a VM. The first removes the existing files and publishes one artifact and the next 2 just publish the additional artifacts.
However this feels really wrong and that it should all be done in one task. It's also not particularly fast having 3 separate processes to deploy files.
How can I set this up better? Speed is a big concern as this would currently take the site out for about 10 minutes while the deploy happens.
combine multiple azure artifacts to one web deploy task in the release
For this issue,I think one 'IIS web app deploy' task could not achieve this feature.
I test with the wildcard provided by default: $(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\**\*.zip
Then I get this error:
From the error message ,it presents that we can not select more than on package with the search pattern, I think this could be due to the limitation of 'IIS web app deploy' task, only one artifact can be specified in an 'IIS web app deploy' task. At present, to deploy multiple artifacts can only be achieved through multiple deploy tasks.
You can make your request to the IIS Web Application Deployment task in git hub.
I want to deploy multiple websites on IIS using a single task in VSTS.
How to achieve this? Using a release definition i included a task which deploys the website on IIS. But in this arrangement,i need to create as many tasks,as many websites are there. what are the ways in which i can use either a JSON file or something and create a single task which reads the website names and port numbers etc from the Json and deploys all websites in one go.
There isn’t the official task that can deploy web apps together, you can create the build task through VSTS extension: Add a build task.
You can refer to the source code of IIS Web App Deployment Using WinRM extension to build a task extension.
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.
I'm trying to deploy an Azure WebJob using the Azure PowerShell SDK or Rest API and I'm having troubles finding support for deploying WebJobs. It's super simple to do through the UI in VS or Azure Management Portal but there doesn't seem to be much automation support.
According to some sites, when you deploy an Azure Website with an associated web job, it's supposed to deploy the Web Job automatically but I'm not seeing that happen when I publish the web project in VS and I don't see how that would work after the bits are compiled through TFS.
I've found some great resources that I've tried following but don't seem to be working for me:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/websites-dotnet-deploy-webjobs/#deploy
http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/08/18/enabling-command-line-or-continuous-delivery-of-azure-webjobs/
Unfortunately, I need to integrate this automation into a standalone deployment orchestration so I can't tie it to MSBuild.
I'd be happy with deploying both the Azure Website and the WebJob together if that's possible. I would imagine there must be a way to automate the uploading of a zip file containing the WebJob executable to the website like you can through the portal but I haven't had any luck finding it.
Apparently according to this post the job just gets put in a folder matching the job name in your websites App_Data folder.
You might have to manually upload the job as a zip file once, but afterwards I assumed you could do some magic in your deployment or in a post build task to build the web job console app and stick it in the appropriate App_Data folder.