We have an enterprise web application which is deployed on s3/cloudfront. Deployments are mostly done at night for less impact to users (local application used mostly in the day).
Current deployment process is to execute a shellscript on server which uses some credentials stored as system env variables. Shell script internally uses grunt task for build and deploy to s3.
Problems
When we run shellscript and if there occured some problems, there is no feedback to one who is doing deployment if he is not looking at the console. Whats the easiest way to implement a feedback system like email if deployment fails.
If we can implement a feedback system, can we do unattended scheduled builds using some tools like jenkins or some other tool.
You could create a rake task which executes your deployment script using popen (http://www.rubydoc.info/stdlib/core/IO.popen) and then send you the results of the command execution (and returnstatus)
This way you could automate the rake task execution via cron or whenever gem (if available) or something alternative like clockwork gem (if you're on a PaaS f.e.)
Related
I have an ASP.NET Core app and trying to automate deployment to a Linux-based Azure App Service through the on-premises Azure DevOps server. I managed to build everything and deploy the code to the App Service.
At this moment, the Startup Command which should run the application (dotnet dllname) fails. When I open the URL of my web app, I see the default Azure "welcome" page (served from opt/defaultsite).
I don't have a problem with this particular failure - I did not configure the connection string and other settings yet, so it was expected. However, I wonder how it is supposed to handle such failures. I have these concerns:
How do I know that the startup failed without visiting the web app manually? The Deploy task finishes successfully with a green mark despite the fact that the startup was not successful.
When the app fails to start, I would like to see the error message in the browser rather than the default site (at least for the non-prod environments). Otherwise, the only way to understand that I have a problem and see the reason is to go to the Kudu console and see the log stream.
If my app crashes, would it restart it or it will switch to the opt/defaultsite page again?
At this moment, to address the first concern, I am going to add another task to the Stage - a simple PowerShell script which would send a request to one of the app endpoints, however, I wonder if Microsoft suggests some better/more native solution.
Basically, the stage will be failed if there are errors/exceptions during the deployment.
However we cannot fail an Azure Release Pipeline stage if startup command is not successful, because the deployment is actually complete.
As a workaround you can add another task to run scripts to request the endpoints to detect that as you did.
I've setup Continuous Integration in my project hosted at Visual Studio Online.
Among other things, I deploy my web application to a test slot and test database and I run integration tests.
However, I don't need the test slot and database to be running all the time. I would like to start them both for the integration tests to run and stop them after my integration tests are done, all automated.
I played around with the Azure PowerShell vNext task, but I couldn't figure out how to accomplish this. Any help would be appreciated. More than the actual answer, I would appreciate a link with more information, if possible.
For the web app slot, you can add AzurePowerShell step in your build defition can create two power-shell script: one start the website via Start-AzureWebsite command before the build start and another one stop the website via Stop-AzureWebsite after the testing is finished.
For the database, you cannot stop it. Refer to this question for details: How do I stop and start a SQL Azure database?
I am using octopus deployment with teamcity. In many cases deployment fails because "The process cannot access the file or dll because it is being used by another process. How to write a script to fix this problem. Please guide.
I'm reading into your question a little here, but it sounds to me that you're trying to deploy a website and it's failing, because the IIS worker process is using the files - what you want to do is recycle the application pool of the website before you deploy, or, if it's a high traffic website, stop the website, do the deploy, then start the website.
Does anyone know of an automated way to deploy a web role to Azure with the "Enable Web Deploy" option enabled? We have an automated acceptance test process that deploys to Azure using Web Deploy to save time. But we would also like to automate the full deployment of the web role so that it could run off-hours on a less frequent basis.
We are currently using the WAPPSCmdlets module to automate full Azure deployments. However, neither this nor the newer official Azure Powershell cmdlets seem to expose a way to enable Web Deploy in new deployments.
What you'll need to do is create a startup task that does the following:
Download and install Web Deploy
Windows Azure Bootstrapper can help you to download and run the installer from a startup task.
Configure Web Deploy with PowerShell. You might want to start with this article: PowerShell scripts for automating Web Deploy setup
Running PowerShell from a startup task might seem tricky at first. If you run into trouble, take a look at this article: Azure Startup Tasks and Powershell: Lessons Learned
Keep in mind that this startup task should only run for CI deployments and not for your production deployments, so this might be something you need to take care of in your build process (you can use different Cloud projects in Visual Studio for example).
I'm using TeamCity for my CI builds, and I'd like to set up a second build for running automated UI tests on Windows XP and Windows 7 virtual machines.
I imagine the build working as follows:
Compile, run unit tests, etc.
Prepare MSI using WiX
Copy MSI to target test machines
Remotely execute MSI's
Copy test harness code to remote machine
Run tests
Build finishes
The automated UI tests are written using NUnit and would need to be run directly on the test virtual machine (they can't run remotely). It's important that if the tests fail, it appears in the TeamCity build log and the build fails. I'd rather not install VS or the TeamCity build agents on either of the test virtual machines.
It seems that most of this should be possible using psexec.exe. Are there any alternative (preferably open source) tools that I should look at?
takes a deep breath
We were looking into something to help us out with our automated UI tests. We use ranorex to test the UI and TeamCity/Msbuild to execute the tests.
We never found any tools to help us out (I’m constantly keeping an eye out for some so will monitor this thread) but here is what we did instead.
The CI server copies the setup files and test scripts to the Testing Host Server.
The CI server then launches a custom app on the Testing Host Server providing the name of the VM to launch.
The Test Host Server then launches the VM software, using Virtual PC.exe -singlepc -pc vhdname.vhd -launch , and waits for it to shutdown (after it’s run its tests).
The VM grabs the setup files and scripts from the network location and executes.
After the tests are run it then returns the results to a networked location and shuts itself down.
Control is returned to the custom app.
Control is returned to the CI server which determines from the results if it has passed or failed (and updates the UI so developers are made aware of the result).
Results are collection as artifacts in TeamCity and tagged in Svn.
I think that's everything. Its convoluted, however, it works. Hope someone of that helps you.
Jeff Brown of the Gallio team has been talking about a tool called Archimedes that he's planning to write to support this kind of requirement. It sounds promising, but I don't think there has been much progress on it so far.
In the mean time though, there is something in the Gallio project called VM Tool that may do what you want. It provides commands to stop, start and snapshot virtual machines, and more importantly, to copy files back and forth and execute commands.
I presume you have also considered Powershell Remoting?