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. :-)
This is a project I've been working on off and on for months and I feel like I'm pretty close, but I just can't seem to get past the final hurdle.
The goal is to develop an organization extension library that contains both internal and 3rd party code that we frequently rely on.
History
As a test project, I started with Apache Poi because that is already in wide use in our environment. I have a plug-in and feature built just from the Poi .jars that allows me to build our current Poi applications as long as I add the plug-in (from my workspace) to my build path. The apps work on the servers because we have already distributed the Poi .jars by manually copying them.
The next step is taking that plug-in and getting it into an updatesite so that all of the servers and developers can synchronize on one version. I found and followed these two excellent blog articles (that I wish existed when I started this project):
http://www.dalsgaard-data.eu/blog/wrap-an-existing-jar-file-into-a-plug-in/
http://www.dalsgaard-data.eu/blog/deploy-an-eclipse-update-site-to-ibm-domino-and-ibm-domino-designer/
With the caveat that the articles are written for Domino 9 and we are running 8.5.3 here, but that only matters in the last (installation) step.
Current
This brings us to the problem. All of the above seems to have worked great up to a point. I can install my feature to my designer client from the eclipse update site and it works great. However, the install is failing when I import that into our updatesite.nsf database. This means that while the developers can all install from the updatesite if I put it on a network drive, that doesn't deploy updates to our servers.
The problem is that when I try to install from the .nsf update site, the Eclipse Updater just hangs. I've let it go for well over an hour and eventually Notes becomes completely unresponsive.
So the question is, is there anything I might have done wrong, either in the development of the plug-in or server configuration that might be causing this issue?
Additional Info
I'm looking at the osgi console and that is largely unhelpful. I am getting the following errors as I'm trying to install: SEVERE Could not access digest on the site: no protocol: 0/5B004DDD5E38F3FF85257CAF004C72C7/$file/digest.zip ::class.method=unknown ::thread=Worker-7 ::loggername=org.eclipse.update.core
I could generate dumps if that would be useful.
Security is also locked down fairly tight here. It could be a security issue - is there a way to troubleshoot that? Once I get to the hang I'm just stuck guessing.
This has been edited for clarity and to update information
I know that this is post is over 5 years ago but...
for those that find this and are trying to resolve the error
SEVERE Could not access digest on the site: no protocol: "
is due to the update site project not having the URL of the Domino updatesite.nsf not being added to the Archives tab of the site.xml.
I found the updatesite.nsf also needs to be anonymously accessible as no credentials are prompted/passed through to the Domino server hosting the updatesite.nsf database (at least from DDE), YMMV from eclipse. So if Anonymous connections are blocked on the Domino server you will be out of luck.
To develop a plug-in you really want to have 3 projects:
the plug-in
the feature
the update site
Of course a feature can contain more than one plug-in (and probably should) and a update site can contain more than one feature (and probably should). Once you have an update site project it features a handy button "build all" that makes sure plug-in, feature and update-site get compiled in one go. And that button is what you really want.
You can point using a setting in your Domino Designer (or local Domino server) to the feature directory. Add a plain text .link file to framework/rcp/eclipse/links, that contains the path to your install site - it then picks up the features and plug-ins from there. After a build you would need to restart designer/server to activate the updated feature.
For the Domino server the approach using an updatesite.nsf and the respective notes.ini setting makes the most sense (to me). http restart required. Lazy people script the whole thing.
I still don't have a great answer for this, but I believe the issue is related to the environment here. I don't have the authority to change the environment, even if I were able to conclusively demonstrate it is the cause of this problem, so it is a moot point. All I can say is that at least one administrator computer had no issue installing from the update site.
For me, the solution for distributing the update site is to put it on a network drive and have everyone install it from there. The server has no problem using it from the updatesite.nsf.
Is there any way to move custom queries I've setup in my company's locally hosted TFS server to my instance of TFS on visualstudio.com? I've Googled/Binged/Yahoo'd and even DuckDuckGo'ed around and asked other devs using the service but none of them had any saved queries they wanted to move, so no one had done any researching yet. After a few fruitless searches I've turned to the experts here on SO. Anyone find anything about this they can share?
The usual suspects when it comes to TFS Migration (namely the TFS Integration Platform) does not support moving project or personal queries. Depending on the quantity of queries, a manual recreation is obviously possible. However, if there are a significant number, then another option is to use the TFS SDK (Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client and Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client). Within there, you can access the "My Queries" and project queries, including their folder hierarchy.
One example of this is available on Mike Poulson's blog where he shows going from a TFS 2010 -> TFS 2012 server. While this example is targeting on-prem, the same holds true for a move from TFS on-prem to Visual Studio Online.
Some of the queries may need "translation" in the migration process (naming differences, etc), using the SDK can also help in that process. So at the end of the day, it's a tradeoff between a manual recreation vs effort to code/debug/test a solution with the SDK.
I have a very large, mostly HTML/SSI site that I manage part-time and do weekly deployments on in addition do being an enterprise Magento developer. The site in question has ~5000 static HTML files and requires a lot of upkeep to manage deployments.
In addition to that site, I manage numerous Magento installs. I currently manage them from SVN and do exports/checkouts from various production and qa branches/tags.
While this is manageable, I don't get some of the things that I know build tools provide. Some of those features would be:
Automatic Minification of CSS/JS
Revision History
Multi-server deployment
Runtime configuration
Stats of broken builds/build time/deployment frequency
Integration with Testing frameworks
The three tools I've been reviewing are
Apache Ant
phpUnderControl
Capistrano (at the insistence of a friend of mine who is a RoR dev)
I briefly looked at Hudson, and had a ton of problems trying to get it up and running.
My Questions:
What is the upside/downside of going to this type of strategy?
Any hidden pitfalls that you've experienced?
Which tool do you think would best fit for the deployment/management of the HTML site?
Does anyone have experience with deploying distributed Magento from a deployment/build management system?
Thanks in advance...
Update
Still no movement here, so I'm going to ask this:
Should I rather rebuild in HTML5 Boilerplate which has Ant build scripts out of the box? This would afford me the ability to use Ant, but the build scripts are already pre-made so I have a good starting point. Your thoughts and suggestions are welcome.
I've got one more tool for you to review: Jenkins (earlyer: Hudson).
Its a great tool to run and control your builds. Furthermore you can remote the console and get notifications via Jabber protocol.
I'm just learning how to do things, and want to start using some sort of version control for a web app.
What's most appropriate for deploying a python or php web app on my own? I'm using linux and have a linux server.
Thanks!
SVN, but you need to be able to easily deploy your webapp with SVN.
Since it is not always a simple task, so I just point out this article which may be of interest for your project.
General principle:
Configure Apache on your development server so that it picks up your checked out working copies as separate subdomains. Using this, you can simply make a checkout of your project and it will automagically be up and running. No need to touch the Apache configuration. You need a DNS wildcard entry so that all subdomains of dev.example.org go to your development server.
The only problem with using the above Apache configuration locally is the DNS wildcard. Unless your desktop is assigned a hostname by your network's DNS server and you can set the wildcard there, you will have to make do with your localhost address. You can install dnsmasq to act as a local caching DNS server and put the wildcard on your own machine
Use dnsmasq so you can achieve the same effect on your own development machine. That way you can develop your web applications locally and you won't need a central development server. In my examples I will be assuming you use subversion for your version control, but it works virtually the same with other version control packages, such as git or bazaar.
Note: (Humor)
This other question on Subversion allowed me to point out to this article about publishing its (source-controlled) data into production, with in it probably the ugliest diagram I ever saw on the topic ;-)
If I had not bumped into git, I would've doubtless gone with SVN. Having said that, I would recommend git.
Nowadays, I would certainly go with a distributed version control system. Setup is faster since you don't need to set up a version control server and everything, all you usually need to do is initialize a certain directory within your development box for version control and you're good to go. They also seem like the way to go these days. If it were 2001, I would recommend a centralized system like Subversion. But it's 2008, everyone is moving to distributed systems and user interfaces and supporting tools tend to get better.
Here are some suggestions for you:
Darcs: Easy to learn and has all the features you will usually need
Mercurial
Git: Powerful. May take some time to understand but evolves rapidly
All three of them should be readily available in your Linux-based OS through the usual package management solutions.
SVN is great.
Nowadays the hype around DVCS.
I prefer Bazaar.
Because of it's name, the support, the feature set, and it works well on my window$ machine too.
I'm using unfuddle.com and I love it. It's free for a one person web app
The answer really depends on your way of thinking. I personally had problems switching to subversion from SourceSafe. If you come from microsoft shop, I'd suggest using SourceGear Vault, it is free for <=2 users. If you come from non microsoft area, then using subversion would be preferrable. Also please consider git if working on linux.
HTH, Valve.
Personally I use monotone, learning a DVCS is definitely the way forward.
For a one-man job, pretty much any revision control system will do the job. It's when you get into multiple people, and past that into multiple repositories, where there start to be differences.
Given that, I'd go with whatever Free Software system your development environment supports best. I see Subversion and Git mentioned and both are fine choices.
SVN would been my first choice. If I have to take a second choice I would go to CVS.
One of the most popular models out there today is Subversion. It's generally easy to setup & configure and is able to handle multiple platforms.
SVN. If one does not need concurrent access (which is your case), it is VERY easy to setup as no server is required at all. Definitely your weapon of choice.
I wholeheartedly agree with SVN. Command-line SVN is quite easy too.
While I like svn a lot, I've found mercurial handy for having the whole repository locally. (the same goes for git, but its interface is a little less polished in my opinion.)
I'm not able to answer the question as asked, because I don't develop on a Linux server.
But maybe this experience has a counterpart in Linux world.
I use a local-on-my-LAN-only IIS server (actually on an old laptop that no longer travels but works as a little server). I have VSS installed on that server too. There is an integration between the IIS Server, the FrontPage extensions on that server, and the VSS.
The upshot is that I can use FrontPage to build and edit my site and build a development image that is always backed up in VSS, and I can check out, check in, and do all of that from within FrontPage.
Now, the way I publish is I take advantage of the sharing capability of VSS so I have a deployment image that shares with the project that is actually an IIS web site. I have a deployment-image directory that I can transfer the latest checked-in material to (material that has not changed is not updated). I then deploy the deployment image to the hosted, public web site using FTP (again, only transfering new and updated files).
I present all of these details to suggest what might be the use-case of interest, even though a different solution approach is needed with Linux.
If I wasn't using a tool that integrated with the web server and also the source control at the server, I could do something similar by checking the VSS material in and out of a local directory and then pushing the updated VSS project to the IIS server web-pages directory hierarchy. The workflow is a little more clumsy. In this case, I would not edit pages directly on the development web server unless I could lock check-in pages as read-only or something.
Does this suggest anything that might be appealing in the Linux server case?
Definitively Mercurial is a good choice, quick, easy to use, perfect for working alone, or with multiple other developer, perfectly multiplateform, handles merges, branches, etc. very simply, plugin based, there are great tools out there such as nice IDE plugins (notably Netbeans and Eclipse).
Robust, it works just as you a expect such a tool to work, not like SVN (and I have years of day to day)...
Both Sun, Xen and Mozilla host all their repos on Mercurial. We're currently moving from SVN to Mercurial after a 6 month daily test, without any regret.
I once used Perforce and was impressed with it. There's GUI and command line versions and it supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Unix for both the server and client. It integrates with Eclipse and has APIs for writing your own client applications (C/C++, Ruby, Perl, Python) It only supports two users and five workspaces before you need to buy licenses though (but that is within the scope of this question).
Subversion is a good choice. For the client, there's TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/) that integrates with the shell and lets you do things with a right click on a folder. For integration with Visual Studio (I'll assume that's your environment) there's VisualSVN (http://www.visualsvn.com/) and AnhkSVN (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/). For the server there's a one-click installer you can find here (http://svn1clicksetup.tigris.org/) that does the setup in a snap. VisualSVN also has a (free) server that you can use which provides it's own web access and security (rather than using apache) and has a mmc-snapin for managing/creating repositories and users.
CVS - No, I'm not joking. Not that it is better (it is not) or the simplest (it isn't), but it really doesn't matter at the end of the day. The important thing is to get started with ANY version control system even if it is a one-developer shop, even if it is CVS.