I am using Azure Mobile Services as the backend for my mobile app. Despite my best efforts, my server side scripts are getting complex now. Is there a way I can keep the insert, update, read, delete scripts for the tables in my service, in source control and maybe have a way to deploy them from within Visual Studio?
Have you checked out the node Azure Command Line Tools? This will likely hold the solution to your problems. These tools allow you to neatly manage your mobile service from your dev machine. The newly added cli tools for Mobile Services also support downloading your scripts. Just run the following command in your Azure Powershell:
azure mobile script download <service_name> <script_name>
The script name syntax is as follows:
For tables: table/.{insert|read|update|delete}
Apple Push Notification: shared/apnsFeedback
Scheduler: scheduler/
Once you have your scripts downloaded and placed on your local filesystem, you could put them in source control with your client that consumes your mobile service, or just throw them in their own git repository. You can't, however, sync your source control repository with your mobile service. In order to upload any changes you've made to your scripts, you'd need to execute the following command in the Azure-CLI again:
azure mobile script upload <service_name> <script_name>
I'm not sure if you can upload multiple scripts at once though. You could probably use some of the Azure-CLI Automation scripts I saw Glenn Block post on github. This could allow you to somehow automate uploading the scripts as a part of your build workflow.
Edit:
I found a few more resources that might help you with this:
Getting started with the CLI and backing up your scripts
More CLI – changing your Mobile Services workflow
These are some great resources from Josh Twist. I'm sure they will push you in the right direction.
Since this question has been answered, a new feature has been added to Azure Mobile Services - integration with Git source control. Basically you can enable this feature in the dashboard of your mobile service, and it converts the storage in a Git repository which you can clone / pull and push updates to.
You can find more information in the tutorial at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/tutorials/store-scripts-in-source-control/.
Related
We run Google Cloud Functions (python), which require to be deployed from Google Cloud Source Repository. Since all the code is stored on GitHub we resort to first mirroring GitHub into Source Repository. Although this only requires a few mouse clicks, it becomes a burden to repeat over 3+ projects (dev, staging, production) times 5+ repos (5+ apps).
I am looking to automate the mirroring config, preferably to add into the Terraform automation we already use, into a hands-off project configuration. Does the Google API support this mirroring automation? So far on my Google Cloud expedition everything was available in their API!
I fail to find Terraform examples though, and would appreciate a tip.
Come to think of it, if I can take Source Repository out of the equation, that would be just fine with me too. After all, I only use it as a pass-through / empty shell.
The Cloud Source Repository API includes a Repo resource that has a Mirror Config object where you could type in your Github's URL, webhook and credentials to automate this procedure. I would initially test it with the create method, but if you have an existing Cloud Source Repository I believe the patch method will also be worth exploring.
Additionally, there is an open Feature Request in order to connect a repository via the Cloud Build GitHub App that I recommend you to star and follow, as it could further ease your automation needs.
Have written multiple Powershell scripts to take backup of AZure API management service. One script calls another and exports all the products and properties to my local machine.
I want to automate this process of backing up everything directly to Bitbucket. To achieve this i have configured Jenkins which is running on a CentOS server but, i don't know how to automate things using it?
I tried installing the Powershell Plugin on Jenkins but as i have multiple scripts written having dependency on one another, i just can't paste the whole thing as it is and run.
so is there a way i can run this multiple codes on Jenkins Powershell plugin instead of composing one single code and then run it?
Second thing, should Jenkins be installed on my local machine rather than on CentOS server in order to achieve this?
Or
if Jenkins has a plugin to link with my Azure account and export services to Bitbucket? (with Powershell codes out of picture)
Is there any other tool / alternative which is little less complicated?
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 am running a mobile service with an increasing amount of scripted functionality. I want to have these scripts somehow stored in a smart format for version control. I'm having hard time finding any information on such scenarios. Is it even possible Azure -> VS2012 (and TFS) or VS2012 (and TFS) -> Azure?
Currently that is not supported on the portal itself. You can do that by using the Command Line Interface, however, as was shown in this blog post. Basically, you can store the scripts in whichever source control system you want (the post uses Git, but it would work with TFS as well) and use the CLI to update your service whenever a new version of the script is checked in.
You can also vote up the source control feature suggestion on the UserVoice for the system, to have that functionality implemented in the service itself.
You can now link your Azure Mobile scripts to a git repo directly from the Azure Mobile Portal Dashboard, allowing you to edit scripts from VS2012 or another editor.
I'm learning FluentMigrator. The thing that I like about FM is that it supports the idea of Forward and Back for migrations (aka Up/Down). I'm finding that it's not ideal about this; there are some holes. Still, it's good.
This leads me to wonder if there are any deployment tools (nant, msbuild or other) that support this idea of rolling forward and back. The scenario that I'm using it in is the deployment of a web app with a related database.
Ideally I'd like to set up my deployment so that, should any part of it fail, it will revert to the previous known working configuration. With FM, this is pretty easy to do (but there are rough spots), so that covers the db. How about the files that make up the web app? Do any deploy tools have support for this?
Deploying to a Windows Server. Assume that I can't make any changes to the server.
I don't know of any Microsoft-centric, automated provisioning/deployment tools like Capistrano. Here are some tools I've heard of, but never used:
MSDeploy, for deploying web application.
Microsoft Deployment Services, for managing operating system configuration
Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager
BladeLogic
HP's Operations Center
Up until about three months ago, we did our deployment/provisioning using custom MSBuild scripts. After a server is provisioned, deploys happen automatically using Robocopy to copy files to a share on the application server, updating changed application binaries and markup files. We've never had a need to rollback any of our deployments, but since our scripts are custom, we could write the logic if we needed to.
MSBuild is a terrible deployment/provisioning language. For the past three months, we've been writing all new scripts in, and porting existing ones to, PowerShell. It is wonderful. With version 2, there is support for running commands on remote servers, like SSH. We haven't used that functionality yet, but I'm looking forward to pushing setup scripts to remote server to provision and deploy at the same time.
We have been using Git to do our deploys for the last 6 months.
Here is the whole process:
CI server build the project
CI server checks it in to a local git repository
CI server pushes the changes to the centralised git repository
User creates an empty repository on the live server
User adds the central git repository to the remotes
User pulls the latest version over https (no need to open any ports)
It is a lot to setup in the beginning but once setup it works great. Deploys take seconds as only changed files get copied.
Another great thing about this method is that git keeps history of changes so rolling back is pretty simple. You can also roll back a few revisions and it's done straight on the live server. If something goes wrong reverting is super fast.
Also you can save some time if you use a hosted git service (github) for your central repository.
This is a very brief description but I can give you more info if you want.
Of course! My favorite is Capistrano. This was originally built for Ruby but I've found that it works just as well for other languages.
https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano