How Do I deploy an application to IIS while that web application is running - deployment

Where I work, we release bug fixes in to the system every night when we know our clients are not using the system.
Trying to take a step towards better service I'd like to deploy to IIS while the application is running.
A solution that comes to mind is to setup two different IIS applications and switch them over after deploy using a script. But I'm not going to try this out as I don't want any complications during our busy hours.
Does anyone have experience in this area of deployment?
Thanks

Regardless of whether you're using PHP, ASP, ASP.NET etc there is no native support for transactional deployment on IIS.
The simplest approach would be to have two physical folders and (optionally two web sites - one production, one test) on your web server, for example:
c:\websites\myapp\dep1
c:\websites\myapp\dep2
Initially your site would have its physical path pointing to c:\websites\myapp\dep1.
When you deploy your latest build you'd deploy into c:\websites\myapp\dep2. Once you're done just switch the physical path of the production site over to this folder. This means you still have the original site and can fall back to it if the new code fails for whatever reason.
The next time you do a deployment you'd deploy into c:\websites\myapp\dep1 and once you're done switch the production site to that folder.
You could optionally have a test site that points to the folder you're deploying to so you can make sure the site works before switching your production site over.
This could all be scripted.
Here's some related reading that may be of interest:
Publishing/uploading new DLL to IIS: website goes down whilst uploading
Is smooth deployment possible with componentized ASP.NET MVC apps?
Rob Conery also had an excellent blog post about the lack of a decent deployment story for ASP.NET application. You should take a trawl through the comments some of which are quite insightful:
ASP.NET Deployment Needs To Be Fixed
Getting Constructive On ASP.NET Deployment

Related

Develop a Service Fabric Web Application without redeploying after each file change

I have stateless .net core 2 Fabric Service Web Application creating using one of the templates that comes with Service Fabric SDK. It is a real pain to develop since I have to do a full deploy before I can see any changes to code/html/script. In my case that operation takes more than 5 minutes.
I have looked at this article that states how it can be done by running the web app from the commandline.
That article is based on Net Core RC2. Does anyone has an updated example on how to do this?
https://dzone.com/articles/aspnet-core-with-kestrel-and-service-fabric
Together with Azure Developer Support i found a solution to speed up the development process
I Fabric Explorer you need to find the node where you Web Application is running. I my case that is _Node_0
By SF SDK design, local SF published file is under C:\SfDevCluster\Data_App\ this folder. In my environment, the website file path is C:\SfDevCluster\Data_App_Node_0\Application1Type_App1\Web1Pkg.Code.1.0.0\wwwroot\lib\bootstrap\dist
So you can also find your HTML, CSS, JS and other static resources under below path:
C:\SfDevCluster\Data_App[node_id][application_type_and_instance_name][service_type_and_version]\
You can just modify the files in this folder, then the change will immediately apply to your local test web browser. Please notice if your service is hosted by micro-service running in several nodes, you may need to modify all nodes files because load balancer may access any folder files randomly.

Automated deployment of web site

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.

how can I set up a continuous deployment with TFSBuild for MVC app?

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.

Setup MVC2 Web App with IIS7

I've seen SO MANY articles that explain how to do this with IIS6, and some that offer SOME guides for IIS 7 but they are ask you to do so much setup and I've tried them all and ALWAYS get errors.
Is there a guide out there that some of you have used that just...works?
All I need is something step by step to setup my local MVC2 app using my local IIS7 server so I can test locally without using VS2010's dev server all the time (gets so annoying).
Assuming you have IIS installed locally you could go to the properties of the project and:
You may also find the following blog post useful.

Click once deployment to a ISP hosted Server (ISP is Lunarpages in this case)

I know this has some crossover to Serverfault.com but the advice on meta.stackoverflow was to ask it here (first) as it requires a .NET dev to answer more than likely.
I am having some problems publishing to my website a Click Once App, I am getting an error message saying (something like) IIS not running, I'm not currently at home to give an exact error message, i'll edit later if it is required to answer this question.
My ISP is lunarpages the plan I am on is this one IIS is definitely running as I have BlogEngine.NET running just fine. Anyone know what is required configuration wise (both server and client) to make this work?
The files that the ClickOnce publish create can be run on just about any web environment (include Apache/Linux.) It simply generates an html page along with the application manifest and your application files. Maybe you can deploy to a local folder and upload the files to the server?