Our team needs an automated deployment tool and I have concentrated on two major options: Ansible and Jenkins.
Could you please consult me about pros and cons of each and also, if you know a better deployment tool, please recommend them and state why.
Some information about our structure: Debian OS (some programmers use Windows 8 and Debian on VM). Our version/code management tools are SVN and GitHub (hopefully soon, only GitHub). Main programming language is PHP.
Ansible and Jenkins actually perfectly supplement each other.
You should start with writing Ansible playbook for provisioning and deployment. When it's ready and you tested it from your local machine you can setup Jenkins job to use that playbook. Jenkins can use different triggers like GitHub commit webhook or cron-like scheduler.
In this setup you rely mostly on Ansible and you use Jenkins as a tool to run Ansible playbook when needed. Seems like a perfect separation of concerns.
Related
I need to manage a few servers that run code that is currently being deployed there as a couple of git repositories. I would like to be able to store in the project's repository the parts (if not all) of the playbook that is relevant for the repository. For example, the list of package dependencies, virtualenv requirements, configuration templates. This will also allow those to change in a per branch/commit way. Meaning I can make sure that if I need to deploy a specific branch/commit, playbook that is correct for that commit is being used, if, say, the configuration template being used changed.
It seems like the only solution is to checkout the git repository locally. Is it possible in ansible to tell it to run a remote play book (from the git repository that is being checked out on the server)? I was thinking of having ansible run a ansible using a local connection on the remote host, I haven't tried it to see if this will actually work out.
How do people manage to use ansible for continuous deployment based on git without some mechanisms for running a remote playbook?
Take a look at ansible-pull.
It pulls the repo and executes playbook.
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.
For a project I am working on, we have CI setup using Jenkins.
We now want to setup Continuous Delivery (CD) using Puppet.
Here is our dev environment specs
Windows 2008 Server
Jboss-SOA-P (jboss AS 5.1 app server) - 2 instances
Jenkins for CI
Installed Puppet Learning VM (as we are evaluating, so we don't have a license to install Puppet Enterprise).
My question is: How can I automate deployment of my application(s) on already installed Jboss servers (on Windows m/c) using Puppet?
For my organization, I am using the following tools to achieve Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration
Foreman: A provisioning and ECN ( External Node Classifier )
Puppet Master :
This will be running in our main server
Puppet Agents:
On rest of the servers
Jenkins:
On main server
Nexus repository for maintaining staging and release repositories on another server
A nexus repository module installed in puppet master. It has the logic to connect to nexus repository, fetch the latest release from "release" repository.
Flow:
I have a jenkins job defined whose purpose is making sure the build doesn't break and at the time of release, I perform maven release
that in turn upload the latest version to nexus release repository.
Load nexus repository module in foreman and map "Nexus" class to all my servers. This is the crucial part that allows me to perform
cloud deployment with a single button click in foreman. To do this, you need to have your own puppet files that perform dbmigration, undeploy and deployment. I always write a deploy maven module for all my projects which will have only these puppet files that allows me to perform deployment in all servers in one shot.
Since you are already familiar with CI and CD, I hope my statements are self explanatory
Without knowing how you want your application deployed, it's hard to answer exactly how to do it. But I'll see if I can point you in the right direction:
There are existing modules on the forge to deploy JBoss with Puppet. I'd recommend looking through and seeing if you can find one that suits your requirements.
You could then integrate your source control to automatically deploy changes to your JBoss instance as they get checked in.
There's an example of using Puppet with Tomcat and Maven for continuous delivery here. It's a few years old, but the concepts still apply: http://www.slideshare.net/carlossg/2013-02-continuous-delivery-apache-con
Here's also an example from CloudBees for contionous delivery with Puppet and Jenkins (which has a lot of the engineers behind Jenkins) https://www.cloudbees.com/event/continuous-delivery-jenkins-and-puppet-debug-bad-bits-production
Plus a general PuppetLabs one here: https://puppetlabs.com/blog/whats-continuous-delivery-get-speed-these-great-puppetconf-decks
Also: I don't want to sound too salesly, and full disclosure, I work at PuppetLabs. But you can use Puppet Enterprise with up to 10 nodes for free, so I'd recommend that over using the Learning VM, which isn't really designed for hosting applications.
As many apps do, we have a number of config and properties files for our Java applications. We have gone with the approach of keeping these files separate from our codebase (i.e. they are not included in the war files for deployment) but in a separate directory. However, I would still like to track changes to these files in a source control and deploy them using our CI.
I'm looking for strategies on how others have done this. Did you write a script to push the files to the app server(s). Does the script live on the CI server?
Our SCM is Mercurial which we have set up on its own server to use as a central repo. Our CI is Hudson (not Jenkins) set up on its own server and of course our app servers are separate from these as well. All servers are *nix OS.
Consider using configuration management tools like puppet or chef for managing all your application configuration files. Both tools use "manifests" or "receipes" which can placed under revision control and matched to each server deploying the application.
Another option is to consider is to develop an install package for your OS, see the following articles for more details:
http://www.sonatype.com/people/2011/11/bringing-java-and-linux-together-on-the-way-to-continuous-live-deployment/
The advantage of doing it this way is that the install can be configured to generate the correct configuration tailored for the environment it is deployed onto. A more important benefit is that it's simpler to manage and install.
My team uses local capistrano scripts for deployment of a few web apps. We use beanstalk's hosted repository for our git repos.
It's always bothered me that our deployment workflow doesn't give us a centralized log of all deployments to each environment. Beanstalk's deployment feature seems to accomplish this goal and much more.
Some weird legacy requirements meant that beanstalk's simple FTP deployments were insufficient. However, their deployment feature can now execute SSH commands and their deployment case study made me seriously reconsider our workflow.
What are the downsides of the beanstalk approach relative to the local capistrano one? Is there any reason I shouldn't make the switch?
The best thing about SSH deployments in Beanstalk is that you don't have to decide between Capistrano and Beanstalk. One of the best use cases is to use them together: Beanstalk as a manager and Capistrano as a performer.
You can setup SSH deployments in Beanstalk to login to one of your servers and issue a Capistrano deployment from there. It will then deploy code to itself and other servers.
This way you get flexibility and bullet-proofness of Capistrano (transactional deploys), with the easy-of-use, permissions, notifications and timeline of Beanstalk Deployments.
This also gives you an ability to run Capistrano deployments from a mobile device or a computer where there's no Capistrano installed.
P.S. — I work at Wildbit.