I recently set up a CI server in TeamCity and now want to take it to the next step, continuous deployment. Basically, we host a suite of restful services and about 3 web applications for each one of our customers. All customers get 3 environments QA, UAT and Prod. We want to be able to automatically deploy our builds once our tests pass. I'm not looking for custom scripting options to do this. I've seen plenty of those of SO. What we're looking for is a solutions like UDeploy but at a lower price point. Is anyone aware of alternatives to UDeploy? Or other Continuous Deployment plugins that work with TeamCity?
Thanks,
I agree with #Niklas Ringdahl -- I think you're thinking about it wrong.
You can deploy directly from TeamCity using MS WebDeploy.
See Troy Hunt's excellent blog series about this:
Part 1: Config transforms
Part 2: MS Build and deployable packages
Part 3: Publishing with WebDeploy
Part 4: Continuous builds with TeamCity
Part 5: WebDeploy with TeamCity
If this is .net you should look at Octopus, it now works nicely with TeamCity.
http://www.octopusdeploy.com/
http://www.paulstovell.com/octopus/octopus-octopack-and-teamcity
I don't know if there's any part of this I don't understand, but I would use TeamCity for that also.
If you have a build configuration to manage your tests, you can easily create configurations for deploy, which are triggered by the success of the test configuration. We handle lots of our deploys that way.
Again, sorry if I'm missing something here...
EDIT:
A build configuration in TeamCity can be triggered when another configuration is successfully built:
Build triggering in JetBrains documentation (Look at "Finish Build trigger")
Or you could use one build configuration with many "Build steps":
Build steps in JetBrains documentation
Each step is run in order, and only if the previous step is successful.
Another alternative: RedGate has recently updated pricing on their Deployment manager tool: http://www.red-gate.com/delivery/deployment-manager/
If you have 5 projects or less, the tool appears to be free.
I'm familiar with Nolio ASAP but have no knowledge about its pricing:
http://www.noliosoft.com/product/nolio-automation-center
As a developer for the product, I'll add BuildMaster to the list of options here. Basically, you can run a basic tutorial to get started deploying from TeamCity (http://inedo.com/buildmaster/extensions/teamcity), then customize your deployment plans to any further environments as needed.
Related
After having just started using Microsoft Release Management, I am more and more convinced that it is not well suited to run integration tests. This might be a false feeling I'm having, and I'd love to get more input on this. When we first considered it, I had the intention to run the tests defined in our test plan through it's pipeline, but now I'm seeing that we should be running those as frequently as possible. We would like to run integration testing every night, but our release candidates are only defined at the end of sprints, so using Release Management for that seems conflicting.
With the tool out of the equation, we are considering exploring the Lab Template again. We did some very minor tests with it a few months ago in a legacy project but never went too far. My main concern now is that both stages need deployment:
the Release Management pipeline needs to deploy our projects to the QA and production environment
the Lab Template also needs to deploy the project on a few virtual machines to run integration tests on
The Release Management uses some very nice abstractions to achieve that. You can code machine scopes and define components based on the drop folder structure to define each part of the whole application to be deployed. On the other hand, the lab management workflow does not support this (or perhaps I'm just missing it). The standard way to make deployment work for lab testing, is to write a custom power shell script that moves the files from the build drop folder to the correct places, creates the application pools for web projects, and stuff like that, all by hand.
Ideally, I'd like to just share the entire deployment workflow between both tools and, since the Release Management way of doing it seems much simpler, I'd use that. This would make it easier to maintain both pipelines at the same time, which I assume is actually commonplace.
What is the correct approach to share the deployment code as much as possible between the two tools?
I would expect that better integration between RM and MTM/LM will be a future feature. In the interim, you could investigate using Desired State Configuration to handle having a single script that configures environments for you.
DSC support isn't really out-of-the-box in RM Update 2, but RM Update 3 will have built-in support for DSC to both Azure and on-prem VMs. Update 3 CTP 1 is out right now, but it's not production-ready.
You can still use DSC from RM in Update 2, it just requires a bit more work.
I'm currently looking to start setting up nightly builds with TFS and our company has never done this before. I'm looking for some pointers on maybe where to get started, what I should look out for as well as structure of solutions.
Background
Current TFS source location has 2 web projects, 5-10 windows services, 10-15 supporting dlls. These will continue to grow.
Currently there are solution files for each web project and each windows service. Each of these solutions contain the supporting projects (internal dlls) and also the correlating unit testing projects.
All of our external dependencies (log4net, nhibernate etc) are managed by NuGet and are in a folder within TFS called packages
Some of my questions include but are not limited to
Should I have a master solution file that contains all of these projects? Maybe this is easier when setting up nightly builds?
I'd also like to run the unit and integration tests as part of the nightly builds. Is this just additional configuration on the build server?
What tools are involved when setting up nightly builds with TFS?
I'm not necessarily looking for complete answers but it would be great if someone could point me to some good resources (books, websites, blogs)? Like I said I'm really green as far as nightly builds are concerned and I just want to make sure I start off on the right foot. Hopefully I can learn from others mistakes.
Here are some simple "answers" to your 3 questions (though I agree with the comments above that this isn't the most answer-able SO question):
An good read on creating reliable builds in MSBuild : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd483291.aspx
Yes running tests is just an option in a TFS Build Definition, you can configure a few options in addition to "on/off" : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253138.aspx
You can also use TFS Lab management and test agents to execute tests in a different manner: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lab_management/archive/2009/05/18/vsts-2010-lab-management-basic-concepts.aspx
Configuring TFS builds : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd647547.aspx
Newbie to automated azure deployment here! I have the happy task of automating our deployment to the cloud. I have also done some reading and discovered that the 2 main tools are MSbuild and Powershell. Please could anyone tell me why i would use one over the other or indeed if there are any better ways to automate the deployment. Keeping in mind that my main concern is performance and i need this deplymrnt to be as fast as possible.
Any insight would be most welcome.
I'm a fan of using PowerShell for deployments. It's pretty quick to set up and the script can be pretty straight forward.
MSBuild can be great too. I use MSBuild from TFS Team Build to kick off a PowerShell script to do the deployment. Works like a champ.
A good starting point would be http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tomholl/archive/2011/12/06/automated-build-and-deployment-with-windows-azure-sdk-1-6.aspx. This blog does a great job of showing you how to build and deploy with Team Build.
If you don't want/need the Team Build and MSBuild part, then just look at his PowerShell script. That covers the basics of getting a deployment from your dev environment to Windows Azure.
You should use Web Deploy, it only takes about a minute to deploy a fix. See these links
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cloud/archive/2011/04/19/enabling-web-deploy-for-windows-azure-web-roles-with-visual-studio.aspx
http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/funkyonex/Speed-Up-Azure-Deployments-with-the-New-Web-Deployment-Feature
At SplendidCRM, we had a similar need to automate deployments to Azure, but as our need was to service our live customers, we had to develop using C#. We have been watching Azure for many years, but it was not until they provided a DNS service did it make sense to make the move. Using the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) libraries, we were able to automate VM creation, SQL database creation and DNS name creation. In addition to the Microsoft documentation for ARM, we found it particularly useful to be able to get the Microsoft source code for the PowerShell scripts that wrap ARM. This is because the documentation does not always provide a complete set of settings.
In the end, we decided to release the Azure deployment code as part of a new Ultimate edition that combines order and customer management with software deployment.
We are currently working on a Salesforce.com custom APEX project that involves a lot of apex classes, triggers and Visualforce pages. We also have numerous applications from AppExchange that are part of the system.
We develop all the Apex Classes, Visualforce pages, etc in test environment and then deploy it to the live environment using Eclipse IDE. What happens is that every time we deploy changes to the live environment, all the test methods of all the classes (including those from AppExchange Apps) seems to be executing. So deployment of a simple change could end up taking couple of minutes.
Is there a way in apex to "package" classes by namespace or something like that so that when we try to deploy a change, only the test methods relevant to that package are executed. If something like that exists, our deployment can happen much faster.
Unfortunately no, there is no partial testing for deployment of apex code, every change, no matter how minute or self-contained triggers a full test run. This among other things enforces code metrics (minimum total code coverage for instance)
IMHO, this is proving to be a two-sided coin when it comes to enforcing code reliability. When we started using apex all of our tests were very comprehensive performing actual testing of the code with lots of asserts and checks. Then we started having very very long deploy times so now our tests serve one and only function, satisfying minimum code coverage, and even with that simplification it takes almost 3 minutes to deploy anything and we only use 20% of our apex code allowance.
IMHO2, Apex is way too slow of a coding platform to be enforcing this kind of testing. I cant even imagine how long the tests would run if we reach 50% allowance, not to mention any more.
This is possible but you'll need to learn about Apache Ant and have a look at the Force.com Migration Toolkit. You can then use a Build file to determine which files are deployed as well as which tests are run.
I'm busy writing a whitepaper that'll touch on this and other related development strategies... I'll post to my blog when it's done.
If we use the apache ant migration tool we have many options for deployment
like
deployCodeFailingTest which will skip the test classes
and if you want to run only specific test classes
please use : something similar to this in ur build.xml
<target name="deployCode">
`<sf:deploy`
username="${sf.username}"
password="${sf.password}"
serverurl="${sf.serverurl}"
deployroot="codepkg">
<runTest>SampleDeployClass</runTest>
</sf:deploy>
</target>
for detailed reference please use this link
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/daas/salesforce_migration_guide.pdf
I would recommend the following approach:
Git as repository for all your sf code
jenkins to deploy your code as CI/CD
PMD as the static code analyser
sfdx as the deployment method in jenkins for deployment.
Refer the trailhead link: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/users/strailhead/trailmixes/architect-dev-lifecycle-and-deployment
With VisualStudio Publish, CruiseControl.NET, MSBuild, aspnet_compiler.exe, and Web Deployment Projects out there, how would one know which tool to use to ultimately get a .NET 2.0 web application into a testing/production environment?
With .NET 1.1, I simply copied all files over to the server's directory and set it to a configured virtual directory in IIS. Unless I am really missing something, it seemed to work just fine. Now I'm reading about how important it is to put some good thought into 2.0 deployment and the the more I read, the more I get confused.
Please breakdown how to choose which tool to use, and why you would use that tool. If more than one tool is needed, please identify how they relate to this process.
CC.NET is for Continuous Integration it can build your setup projects as artifacts, but that is not it's main purpose. MSBuild is the Microsoft build system -- again, not related to deployment. aspnet_complier compiles your web sties, which may make deployment easier, but is not in itself deployment.
Web deployment projects is what you should be looking at. Here's a decent little post that goes over some of the options for deployment and a reference from MSDN. There are also commercial products.
In most cases, you can right-click on project in VS.NET and choose "Publish". This will give you a few options for deploying via FTP or file path.
Publish Web http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/1261/screencfl.png
What we do it publish to an SVN repository, then run SVN UPDATE on the machines it needs to go to...
I use TeamCity, which implements
Rebuilding solution with
devenv.exe in command line
Changing settings in web.config
(connection strings and debug mode)
with sed.exe
Precompiling WebSite
with the aspnet_compiler in command
line.
Copying solution to FTP
(with internal tool)