Currently I am using sourcetree to manage my repo's. I've read about using different branches for 3 stages of website development. I've seen sites like deployhq.com and beanstalkapp.com. I am curious is there a "free" way to deploy/rollback and publish via sftp/shh to my web servers both staging and live production for each of my repo's. I need a way for junior level developers to easily be able to do it too, be great if there was a review process. If there is no free method, what;s the best paid method out there. I also use bitbucket.org to store my repos.
Thanks so much
You could use a lightweight deployment tool such as Kwatee (self-promotion). Kwatee is free and can deploy any files via a web interface or python scripts (also ant/maven if you use java). All you'd have to do is to automate the check-out of your branch and then trigger the deploy command in kwatee which will use ssh/scp or telnet/ftp behind the scenes to update your deployment (only changes will be deployed).
Related
We have 3 environments:
Development: Team City deploys here for Subversion commits on trunk.
Staging: User acceptance is done here, on builds that are release candidates.
Production: When UAT passed, the passing code set is deployed here.
We're using Team City and only have Continuous Integration setup with our development environment. I don't want to save artifacts for every development deployment that Team City does. I want an assigned person to be able to fire a build configuration that will deploy a certain successful development deployment to our staging server.
Then, I want each staging deployment to save artifacts. When a staging deployment passes UAT, I want to deploy that package to Production.
I'm not sure how to set this up in Team City. I'm using version 6.5.4, and I'm aware there's a "Promote..." action/trigger, but I think it depends on saved artifacts. I don't want to save development deployments each time as artifacts, but I do want the person running the staging deployment to be able to specify which successful development deployment to deploy to staging.
I'm aware there may be multiple ways to do this, is there a best practice? What is your setup and why do you recommend it?
Update:
I have one answer so far, and it's an idea we had considered internally. I'd really like to know if anyone has a somewhat automated way for deploying to a staging/production environemnt via Team City itself, where only people with certain role/permission can run a deploy script to production rather than having to manually deal with any kind of artifact package. Anyone?
Update 2
I still have 1 day to award bounty, and I thought the answer below didn't answer my question, but after rereading it I see that my question wasn't what I thought it was.
Are there any ways to use Team City for some kind of automated deployment to Staging/Production environments?
I think you're actually asking two different questions here; one is about controlling access rights to TeamCity builds and another is about the logistics of artifact management.
Regarding permissions, I assume what you mean by "only people with certain role/permission can run a deploy script to production" and your response to Julien is that you probably don't want devs deploying direct to production but you do want them to be able to see other builds in the project. This is possibly also similar to Julien's scenario when IT then take the process "offline" from TeamCity (either that or it's just IT doing what IT do and insisting they must use a separate, entirely inefficient process because "that's just the way we do it" - don't get me started on that!)
The problem is simply that all permissions in TeamCity are applied against the project and never the build so if you've got one project with all your builds, there's no ability to apply permissions granularity to dev versus production builds. I've previously dealt with this in two ways:
Handle it socially. Everyone knows what their responsibilities are and you don't run what you're not meant to run. If you do, it's audited and traceable back to YOU. Work fine when there's maturity, a clear idea of responsibilities and not compliance requirement that prohibits it.
Create separate projects. I don't like having to do this but it does fix the problem. You can still use artifacts from another project and means you simply end up with one project containing builds that deploy to environments you're happy for all the devs to access and another project to sensitive environments. The downside is that if the production build fails, the very people you probably want support from won't be able to access it!
Regarding artifact management, there's no problem with retaining these in the development build, just define a clean-up policy that only keeps artifacts from the last X builds if you're worried about capacity. A lot of people want certainty they're deploying the same compiled output to every environment which means once you build it, you want to keep it around for later use.
Once you have these artefacts from your dev deployment, you can re-deploy them to your other environments through separate builds. You'll have an issue with config transforms (assuming you're using them), but have a read of this 2 part series for some ideas on how to address that (I'm yet to absorb it in detail but I believe he's on the right track).
Does that answer your question? Is there anything still missing?
We also used TeamCity as our build server so let me explain our setup.
We have 4 environments
Development used by Dev to verify commits in a server environment
QA for testing purposes
Staging for deployment checks and some UAT
Production
We only use TeamCity to deploy to Development (Nightly builds) and to QA (on-demand).
The Dev build uses the trunk branch and QA build uses a different branch used for the RC.
Deployment to the Staging and Production are managed by the IT team, and are therefore not automated.
What we do instead is that we use TeamCity to produce artifacts from the QA build. The artifacts are the deployment kits sent for Staging/Production deployments.
That said, I am not sure if TeamCity would provide you a complete control on which build can be promoted to which environment. We basically control this on the SVN side with branches, and have different builds for those branches. You could (should) do be able to manage this it the same way. You can therefore ensure what is getting deployed.
I understand that your needs may be slightly different than ours but I hope that this will helps you finding the best setup.
I think you might want to check out something like Octopus Deploy or BuildMaster. They provide a nice structure for the deployment practices you're trying to automate. Both tools integrate with TeamCity nicely.
Basically, you'd continue to use TeamCity for CI, and you could also continue to deploy to your development environment with TeamCity too, but you'd use one of the deployment tools to promote an (existing) build to staging and production.
Edit 2014-02-05 – Update
The makers of BuildMaster have a new deployment feature – ProGet Deploy – for their NuGet server tool, ProGet. It's very similar to Octopus Deploy, tho I haven't played with it yet myself, so Octopus may have a better visualization of what versions have been deployed to which environments; I still use BuildMaster because of that important feature.
Also, I'm currently using both TeamCity, BuildMaster, and ProGet and I never want to go back to not having automated builds. Currently, all of my apps are built and deployed via BuildMaster. All of my library projects are built in TeamCity and deployed to ProGet. Being able to manage my internal dependencies via the NuGet infrastructure is nice.
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
I've never worked with any version control systems before. Now I'm trying to learn Mercurial, but I'm confused (I've already read about 10-15 articles + hginit.com). I don't know how to organize the workflow.
I have a testing server and a production server. I work from my office computer and from my home laptop. I make changes directly on the testing server, and every week or so copy new code to my production server. I also need wiki/issues/etc. pretty much everything bitbucket.org has. I know that's a bad way of doing things.
Is there any tutorial or articles on how to organize the workflow? I'd also appreciate any schemes/sketches describing the process.
Thank you!
[Edit: Changed based on comments]
Using Bitbucket
Once you have created an account.
You should be able to create a repo with an appropriate url. Then you can clone it to create a local repository.
Check out getting started.
See the following to push the updates to BitBucket.
BitBucket comes with very extensive documentation.
Also there are, other useful tools to work with BitBucket:
BitbucketExtension that allows you to use command line for a number of operations.
Using Mercurial Queues and bitbucket.org
Organizing workflow
You will have to evolve a workflow that suits you. In your case, it looks like you have a testing server and production server.
So , you can setup two repositories, one for the testing server ad one for production. You can make push to testing server automatic so that you can test out the changes immediately. You can tag releases that are then pushed to production server.
Your local repo can be used to publish changes to testing server.
You can push the approved changes, tagged to BitBucket repository.
I am looking for lightweight proprietary or open-source build-automation and deployment software (so, a GUI, and not command line based). Currently, developers commit code to SVN, and a separate team is responsible for building the code, and deploying it to multiple environments. So, the tool is needed for managing the build and deploying it only, and not keeping track of developers and managing SVN (continuous integration stuff, etc, is not needed).
In terms of needs, I would like it to:
Run on Unix
Builds Java projects
Manual build and deploy ability
Web-based GUI
Check out from SVN
be able to schedule builds
use the build scripts modularly; I want to be able to change build scripts easily
be able to specify different SVN branches for a single build, ie have modules in a build coming from multiple SVN sources and not just a single SVN branch.
be able to have multiple, concurrent builds
Verbose logs
Ability to stop a build
Security permissions
Email notifications on success or failure
Usable via blackberry: I want to be able to initiate builds and deployments via blackberry. Essentially, the entire site should be black berry friendly for builds/deployment.
This last one (the blackberry one) might be limiting, but it's something that I would like. If you have solutions that meet the other requirements, let me know about those too, since blackberry support isn't a deal breaker.
Although it is meant to be a continuous integration tool, I recommend Hudson. It can be run natively or via web container (e.g., Tomcat). You can configure Jobs in Hudson that automate various tasks for you. A lot of plugins help you in fulfilling your special needs.
In terms of your needs:
Manual build and deploy abilityYou can trigger jobs on your own or automatically. Whether the job only builds you application and deploys it or triggers another job that deploys it is up to you.
Check out from SVNYou can configure a job to checkout or update from a specific SVN repository.
be able to schedule buildseven cron-like
use the build scripts modularly; I want to be able to change build scripts easilyWe use ant and configure a build with property definitions in a Hudson job.
be able to specify different SVN branches for a single build, ie have modules in a build coming from multiple SVN sources and not just a single SVN branch.You can configure a job with different SVN repositories and branches.
be able to have multiple, concurrent buildsYou can specify how many parallel jobs Hudson should handle, though, you can have multiple concurrent builds.
Verbose logsFor each job, Hudson keeps the log output of your build/deploy scripts
Ability to stop a buildYou can stop a running job at any time
Security permissionsHudson provides fine-grained user permissions. You can even use LDAP.
Email notifications on success or failureSure. Hudson also provides notification via the Jabber chat protocol.
Usable via blackberryI don't know whether a blackberry app exists. However, since Hudson is a web application you may access your Hudson instance via blackbrowser browser.
Well this sounds like a Hudson promotion ;) However, I'm not involved in Hudson, I just used it each day and it helps me a lot in fulfilling my development tasks.
Take a look at FinalBuilder. As for the Blackberry requirement, perhaps you could use Remote desktop to see what's happening on the build machine? I don't know if Blackberry does that though.
Look at Hyper Build - it does everything you want, except for the BlackBerry thing. But as others have said, you could use a workaround for that like using Remote Desktop.
DISCLAIMER: I work for LogicNP Software, the developer of Hyper Build.
I am coding a website using the Codeigniter PHP framework.
I am using mercurial for version control.
I have 3 systems I work with. I do my coding on a Windows 7 machine using Netbeans 6.9.1. I am occasionally making commits, and pushing to a repository at Bitbucket.org, purely for the purposes of backup and version control.
I have a "beta" website (on a shared Linux box with it's own dedicated IP address) that I upload to using FTP, where I can test that everything is working as intended on an actual site running Linux.
Once I'm happy with that, I upload to my "live" site, which is on it's own dedicated server. Again I'm just using FTP to upload the files from my development server.
I realize that this is all kinds of wrong. For one thing I have to go in and change some things on the beta and live machines so that they're referring to the correct domain name, instead of localhost. For another, I'm not making use of mercurial at all to help with this. I assume instead of uploading from FTP, I could be using mercurial to "grab" a particular revision that I've marked as ready to deploy. I also think I could possibly be doing something in Netbeans differently to make the process easier.
What I want to do is have some very smoothe way to control all this, and hopefully one that knows how to deal with the issue of a slightly different configuration setup for the beta and live sites from the localhost.
Is there a standard way to do what I'm looking for? I've seen references to some third party apps for "continuous integration" but I'm not sure I need anything like that.
I'm a little lost as to what would be the SIMPLEST thing for me to do that would make my life easier....any help greatly appreciated :) Thanks!
It depends on how different the setup for each site is, and if there are secrets involved, which should not be visible on a public place (I assume you use a public bitbucket repository).
If the changes are not sensitive, then you can add two additional branches for your test and production servers, where only the configuration changes are applied. Every time you change something in default and deploy it to test, you would simply merge default on top of test, and mercurial fill in the different configuration settings in the process. Then the server deployment wold be a call to hg archive within the correct branch.
A typical change history would look like this:
O----o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o---o default
\ \ \
T1--------T2-----------T3 test
\ \
P1---------------------P2 production
where in T1 and P1 the parameters for test and production are filled in. You also can use this branch setup to mature the development of your site, where you hack in default, and only propagate stable changes into test and production.
If the changes are sensitive, you can create a non-versionized deploy script (or better a versionized deployment script and a not versionized configuration file), which patches the output of hg archive.
You should use deployment scripts anyway, which handles the packaging of the product and deploy an the target in an automated and standardized way. Within this script you can also embed information about the source revision into the final archive.
Note that this model works fine for an environment, where no changes are made on the server. If you do changes to the product on the server, you need to copy the files from the server back into your development environment(at the correct revision), to check what was changed on the server. When you want to make changes also on the server, you might want to install mercurial also there.