I have some questions around the best mechanism to deploy MVC web applications to different environments. Previously I used setup projects (.msi's) but as these have been discontinued in VS2012 I am looking to move to an alternative.
Let me explain my current setup. I currently have a CI setup using TFSBuild 2010 with Team Foundation Server for source control.
A number of developers work on their local machines and check in to the TFS Server. We regularly deploy to a single server dev environment and a load balanced qa environment with 2 servers. Our current process includes installing an msi which carries out some of the following custom actions:
brings current app offline with the app_offline.htm file
run in database scripts (from database project in the solution)
modifies web.config (different for each web server of qa)
labels the code
warmup each deployed file via http request
etc
This is the current process. Now I would like to make some changes. Firstly, I need alternative to msi's. From som research I believe that web deploy via IIS and using MsDeploy is the best alternative. I can use web config transforms for web config modifications. Is this correct and if so, could I get an outline of what I need to do?
Secondly I want to set up continuous delivery via TFSBuild, I have no idea how this may be achieved, would it be possible to get an outline of how it can be integrated in to my current setup? Rather than check in driven, I would like it to be user driven following check in. Also, would it be possible for this to also run in database scripts from a database project in the solution.
Finally, there is also a production environment, but I would like to manually deploy this - can my process also produce an artifact that I can manually install?
Vishal Joshi has some information on his blog that is reasonably good, http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2010/11/team-build-web-deployment-web-deploy-vs.html. It does have the downside that your deployment password is include in the properties you pass to msbuild.
Syed Hashimi has also posted some information on this in another questions Team Build: Publish locally using MSDeploy.
Related
What is the best way to achieve DevOps with XPages.
Multiple Developers working as a team, On Premises Servers [Dev, QA,
Prod] can we replicate to Bluemix? Source Control Automated Testing UI
/ Application, Unit testing business logic with testing framework, Automated Deployment
IDE/Tools
Domino Designer; are there other ways?
Note: Use of Views when the data is in a NSF, otherwise data is in the cloud, or SQL. No Forms or other classic Notes design elements.
What are your approaches to this?
This is a high level overview of the topics required to attempt what you're describing. I'm breezing past lots of details, so please search them out; I've tried to reference what I'm currently aware of as far as supporting documentation and blog posts, etc. of others. If anyone has anything good to add, I'm happy to add it in.
There are several components involved with what you're describing, generally amounting to:
scm workflow
building the app (NSF)
deploying the built app to a Domino server
Everything else, such as release workflow through a QA/QC environment, is secondary to the primary steps above. I'll outline what I'm currently doing with, attempting to highlight where I'm working on improving the process.
1. SCM Workflow
This can be incredibly opinionated and will depend a lot on how your team does/wants to use source control with your deployment / release process. Below I'll touch on performing tests, conceptually, during/around the build step.
I've switched from a fairly generic scm server implementation to a GitLab instance. Even running a CE instance is pretty fantastic with their CI runner capabilities. Previously, I had a Jenkins CI instance performing about the same tasks, but had to bake more "workflow" into the Jenkins task, whereas now most of that logic is in a unified script, referenced from a config file (.gitlab-ci.yml). This is similar to how a Travis CI or other similar CI config file works.
This config calls some additional helper work, but ultimately revolves around an adapted version of Egor Margineanu's PowerShell script which invokes the headless DDE build task.
2. Building an NSF from Source
I've blogged about my general build process, with my previous Jenkins CI implementation. I followed the blogging of Cameron Gregor and Martin Pradny for this. Ultimately, you need to:
configure a Windows environment with Domino Designer
set up Domino Designer to import from ODP (disable export), ensuring Build Automatically is enabled
the notes.ini will need a flag of DESIGNER_AUTO_ENABLED=true
the Jenkins CI or GitLab CI runner (or other) will need to run as the logged in user, not a Windows service; this allows it to invoke the "headless dde" command correctly, since it runs in the background as opposed to a true headless invocation
ensure that Domino Designer can start without prompting for a user's password
My blog post covers additional topics such as flagging the build as success or failure, by scanning the output logs for being marked as a failed build. It also touches on how to submit the code to a SonarQube instance.
Ref: IBM Notes/Domino App Dev Wiki page on headless designer
Testing
Any additional testing or other workflow considerations (e.g.- QA/QC approval) should go around the build phase, depending on how you set up your SCM workflow. A lot of the implementation will revolve around the specifics of your setup. A general idea is to allow/prevent deployment based on the outcome of the build + test phase.
Bluemix Concerns
IBM Bluemix, the only PaaS that runs IBM XPages applications, will require some additional consideration, such as:
their Git deploy process will only accept a pre-built NSF
the NSF must be signed by the account owner's Bluemix ID
Ref:
- IBM XPages on Bluemix
- Bluemix Docs: Building XPages apps for the Bluemix Runtime
3. Deploy
To Bluemix
If you're looking to deploy an XPages app to run on Bluemix, you would want to either ensure your headless build runs with the Bluemix ID, or is at least signed with it, and then deploy it for a production push either via a git connection or the cf/bluemix command line utility. Bluemix's receive hooks handle all the rest of the deployment concerns, such as starting/stopping the server instance, etc.
To On-Premise Server
A user ID with appropriate level credentials needs to perform the work of either performing a design replace/refresh or stopping a dev/test/staging server, performing the file copy of the .nsf, then starting it back up. I've heard rumors of Cameron Gregor making use of a plugin to Domino Designer to perform the operations needed for OSGi plugin development, which sounds pretty useful. As most of my Domino application development is almost purely NSF based, I'm focusing more on an approach of deploying to a staging/dev/test server, which I can then perform a design task on to do the needed refresh/replace; closer to the "normal" Domino way of doing things.
Summary
Again, there are a lot of moving pieces involved here, some of which gets rather opinionated rather quickly. For example, I'm currently virtualizing my build machine, so I can spool up a couple virtual machines of it, allowing for more than one build at a time. If there are major gaps in the process, let me know and I'll fill it what I can.
We've got some legacy on-premise apps that we're evaluating moving off-site, and we are evaluating all our options. I understand that Azure Web Sites would be a lot easier to setup, but at this point it looks like may need some of the additional control that Cloud Services gives us.
However, everything I've read about Cloud Services so far demonstrates how you build an app and then deploy the build to the cloud. Similarly, you can connect to a Visual Studio Online repository, define builds in VSO, and after a commit, a build is performed and the build is deployed to the cloud.
However, in our case some of our pages are Classic ASP pages. In the event that one of these pages changes, I have not been able to figure out a workflow that allows us to deploy the updated files. Remember, classic ASP files do not have a "build" process; it's like a powershell script that is interpreted at runtime.
There is no Visual Studio solution or project involved with these apps. It's just a package of files we want to upload. For a "proof of concept" I decided to start with the simplest possible "app," a simple "hello.txt" file, and I have not been able to figure out a way to deploy this without "wrapping" it in a Visual Studio solution.
I was hoping that I could use, e.g., Publish-AzureServiceProject, however this appears to need a ServiceDefinition.csdef file, and again, I'm not sure how to do this without setting up solution in Visual Studio--a solution that wouldn't be used for anything.
I have a feeling I'm missing something and just need to find the appropriate publish settings file, or proper use of an Azure cmdlet. Is there a straightforward way to publish a package of files to an Azure Cloud Service?
Josh, you will need to package the files into a deployable package. This can be achieved using the cspack commandline tool and a hand-crafted definition file. Your ASP files would be treated as 'content' in this case.
The easiest way would be just to create stub Visual Studio Solution and include a 'Cloud Service' project to which you add all the ASP files. This way all your files will be redeployed in the event that your Web Roles require recycling by the Azure fabric.
While this might seem like a big overhead if you need to tweak just a single file, it is the correct way to manage PaaS deployments in Azure. If this process doesn't work for you then you should consider moving to an IaaS VM you fully manage yourself.
One thing that may be helpful is to realize that the web role in Cloud Services are just VM's using IIS. For that reason, you can connect to them just like any other server, via RDP, FTP, etc. Our team often bypasses the overhead of simple things, like deploying a new CSS file, an image, etc. by simply copying it in the old school way.
Again, not sure if this helps you, but old school techniques work just as well. :-)
I'm planning to do an automated deployment of a website,but im kind of stuck at this moment. I have looked at MS-Deploy, it got all the functions for deploying Website. I have a created a Web application package (.ZIP file) and I tested this on my local machine it is deploying website i.e
Create Web application under default website
Publishing files in c:\inetpub\wwwroot directory
Set ACLs on directories,etc
But i want to achieve few more extra steps for example:
Check whether Web application exists in Default Website, if not
create a Web application
Check whether Application pool exists, if not create a App pool
(given name) with a specific credentials and Assign App-pool to Web
application
Before it deploys take a backup copy of existing Web application (IF
exists)
publish offline page (app_offline.htm)
publishing the files to application directory
Replace the AppSettings section(in web.config file) to with actual values
Encrypt Web.config connection string
If there is any error whilst installing web application, rollback the web application to its previous version
The question is whether can i achieve all these functions via MS-Deploy or do i need to write any script, please suggest me what scripting language should i use
Please let me know if you need more information.
Thanks in advance
I'm not an expert on this topic but have been doing a bit of research on automated deployment with MSDeploy lately, and think I can offer the following;
This is default behaviour if you use the iisApp provider.
I know you can do this with the appPoolConfig provider, but I'm unsure as to how you would run this and #1 together as part of the same package. Perhaps as part of a pre- or post-sync command?
This is standard in v3, as long as it's set up on the server. Not used it myself, but read this anyway.
Fiddly. Not supported in MSDeploy, but you can vote for it if you want. Also, check out this SO answer (and also worth checking out PackageWeb, but the same answers' author).
Not sure I follow. This is done as part of a successful deployment, surely?
Use web.config transforms and optionally the aforementioned PackageWeb for a neat way to do this. Also check out Web Publish Profiles.
Difficult. My understanding is that the encryption is based on the machine.config, so you'd either have to run a post-sync script which would run some sort of remote Powershell script on the remote server to encrypt the web.config using aspnet_regiis, or you'd have to encrypt the config as part of your build process and then muck about with custom keys and the RSA provider (some info here).
I hope that helps. As I said, I'm no expert, so happy to be corrected by those more knowledgeable. Maybe also worth mentioning that MSDeploy is a lot more powerful if you use it via the command-line rather than creating packages from VS, although there is a bit of a learning curve to go with it.
What is currently the "best" way to develop a back-end system in Azure Mobile Services?
Specifically, what tools are available? From what I've seen, most examples just go to the Management portal and manually add a few lines into the script window. This is worse than using just Notepad, and doesn't have any concept of version control...
Is there any way to make a project in VS 2012 that contains all the Node.js code that will run in the Azure Mobile service? Is there a way of fully running that code on a local development environment that mimics the Mobile Services?
I need to have server-side code with much more complexity than is shown in most of the Mobile Services samples or documentation that I've been able to find.
I have a web site, and a Win 8 Store App that need to authenticate against, and access relatively complex data structures from a back-end database. The solution being pushed right now all seem to include Mobile Services at the center of it, using simple REST against raw tables, but all the examples are too simple to be useful.
Can someone point me to a "real-life" sample of using Mobile Services, and a "mature" way of developing and testing such a system using the tools in Visual Studio?
Thanks.
Why you have no other option than the Management portal is really beyond me. It seems very awkward for a C#/.NET developer to go back to Notepad style programming with console.log() debugging.
What I would love to see is some Node.js entry points that you could connect to a regular C# assembly which could fulfill the request (as in ASP.NET MVC or Web API) having the full .NET Framework at your disposal.
What I could see as a possible architecture is to have:
ASP.NET MVC hosted on Azure
--- writes processed data with logic to --->
Azure SQL DB <--- reads from --- Azure Mobile Services ---- bridge to ---> Mobile devices
Or
Cloud Worker Role on Azure ---- crunching/processing ----> Azure SQL DB <---- reading/writing raw data ---- Azure Mobile Services ---- bridge to ---> Mobile devices
You can use the Mobile Services facility for mobile devices facilities, scheduling and push notifications with limited code and do most of the coding in a managed .NET environment.
The AMS (Azure Mobile Services) along with Azure has advanced dramatically since this post was written and the replied answers.
Some of this stuff still holds true. If you have a ton of node.js written not in the Azure cloud portal, you will want to copy and paste to the portal online, custom api calls section and even perhaps sql backend tables for CRUD operations.
The hope for C# developers is that it is NOW in preview mode in which YOU CAN skip node.js and build everything without node.js very shortly... Some bugs to work out, but in 6 months this will be fairly solid.
I had questions and issue and a guy named Carlos carlosfigueira was very helpful.
Azure Mobile Services - Getting more user information
Josh covers unit testing server-scripts here: http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Unit_testing_Mobile_Services_scripts_Day_7_.aspx
In this tutorial, he uses the Mocha testing framework for JS (id TDD mode) and walks through an example for testing an INSERT script that encrypts the value of a particular property (text) and a read script that decrypts it (value is encrypted at rest in SQL db).
You can also find aggregation of links and tutorials here.
I would suggest that you build this solution using Windows Azure Mobile solutions especially it supports the Node JS NPM right now, which means you can create the API you want on the Windows Azure using the Node JS NPM and can work with it using WAMS easily. have a look on the following link it will help you understand what I want to say more.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/06/14/windows-azure-major-updates-for-mobile-backend-development.aspx
For the Client I also suggest that you build it using SignalR which is designed for cases such yours where real time applications require a lot of transactions from the server side.
http://www.asp.net/signalr
you can also find more details about how you can integrate both of them in the following link: http://hhaggan.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/signalr-node-js/
I hope these help you, let me know if you need anything else.
For running locally, the mobile service has the same Kudu environment available in azure websites, so you can browse to https://your_service_name.scm.azure-mobile.net If you navigate to the Debug Console from the top nav, you can download everything running in the site/wwwroot folder.
You can run this nodejs project locally (On windows only if you require the SQL Server npm package). Your code is in App_Data/config/scripts. If you replace the downloaded content with your current local git working copy, you can develop and debug locally, and then push changes as usual.
Tools I use:
Eclipse with JS environment (or any nodejs IDE).
Git
Postman
Steps:
Enable source control to your azure mobile service.
Pull to your local and create a eclipse project with the source.
Make changes and push.
Test with POSTman
This procedure allows me to develop really fast and eclipse tell me the common JS errors. But it has obvious downside:
No debugging (I use console.log)
The project ended up with a lot of commits (its hard to use git for proper source control)
I just did a blog post on running Azure Mobile Services locally: http://www.mikelanzetta.com/2014/09/running-azure-mobile-services-locally/ - basically it interrogates the API and starts up express, and allows you to run mocha yourself locally. It's a bit cleaner than pulling down the full wwwroot from the scm link, and I found using my local runner as a git submodule made it easy to work with (and easy for me to use VSO for managing my tests).
Anyway, for actual development, I use the Git integration and WebStorm - it automatically figures out the tasks in my local Gruntfile and makes it easy to run and test. For once it's deployed, Postman is helpful.
How do you deploy your websites?
For example: I am developing a site with a php framework and have it under version controle with git with all my local configs. When I want to put it on a web server for testing or updating the live application i have to copy it onto the server, change the config files, delete my test stuff etc.
So how do you handle these tasks?
I thought about using ant and write a deployment script for this.
Does there already exists a common solution for this "problem"? Because I don't think im the only one who need something like this.
There are quite a bunch of stuff available, but you might like Phing (like ANT for java).
Questions related to PHP+Phing:
Do you use Phing?
How do you manage your build [using Phing] process?
Setting up a deployment / build / CI cycle for PHP projects
what can Phing do that Ant can't?
Also read this questions sounds very interesting How To Deploy Your PHP Applications Correctly?
There is a specific question (a possible duplicate of your questions) has been answered a while ago, take a look at it Deploy a project using Git push
It seems you are using php, you should be good to go with capistrano. It is very easy to use capistrano for deployment with rails but it can also be tricked a bit to use for php.
Basically what you do with capistrano is -
Tell it which is you application server
Tell you database server
Tell web server (in most cases web server, app server and db server are same)
Specify you git repository with branch you want to deploy from
Once configured, you can deploy with capistrano with single command. You can even rollback your deployments from some of backup releases created by capistrano.
Now form some the repetitive tasks like, copying configs files like database configs (which generally are ignored in git), you create some tasks, which just creates symlinks or copies the files at appropriate location. These tasks will be called with deploy_hookes e.g. after_symlink hook.
You can find more about capistrano here - https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/wiki
It comes with very good documentation, after getting overview, you may search for your framework specific approach to do this.