I have a Visual Studio solution with one SSRS project, two SSIS projects, one SSAS project and one SQL Server project. I'm using TFS2013 Update 4.
I'd like to deploy this solution using TFS Release Management in two environments. First environment should be "populated" after the developer's check-in and in the second environment the projects should be deployed only in the next night (during the day the environment is used by the testers and a new deployment can affect their data).
It's possible to achieve this with TFS Release Manager 2013.4?
Update 1:
A single gated check-in build is taking too much time and that's why in this moment I have gated check-in builds separate for each project in order to keep the developer's waiting time to minimum.
Update 2:
The current setup is with five gated check-in builds that are building and deploying each project to the first environment and one nightly build that is building and deploying to the second environment the entire solution.
Add an additional "collector" build, that you automatically queue from the others whose purpose is to collect artifacts and be the reference for Release Manager.
In other words, say you have five CI builds, one for each project named CI1 to CI5. In each CI post-test script you run a similar command
TFSBuild start /collection:%TF_BUILD_COLLECTIONURI% /buildDefinition:Collector /queue /msBuildArguments:CIDrop=%TF_BUILD_DROPLOCATION%
to queue the Collector build.
This latter collects the artifacts from the parent build and the last know good artifacts of the remaining CI builds and copies them to its drop location.
Now you can use Release Manager as usual on this Collector build.
Related
I am new to the world of scripting with TFS2015. I created a script that builds all of the projects within my solution (it is a rather large solution) and puts it out in a shared folder (where each project has its own subfolder).
I would like to create a separate script for each project that simply copies the bin folder from the shared and pastes it out on my Test environment. I rarely need to deploy everything, so the idea is one build...multiple deploys.
However, when I run my deploy script using the Copy Files step it is doing another build. Although it copies the files that I expect, it is after a full build that creates the folder structure for the build.
Am I able to make the Copy Files step NOT do a Build?
Here is the steps that my script is curently doing:
As you can see, there is only one step (Copy Files) but it still does the Get sources and copies everything into a new folder on the build box like so (where the number keeps incrementing up with each run of the script):
I just want to copy the files from the Source to the Target and not do a build or Get Sources.
It looks like you're still on TFS 2015 RTM or Update 1. Which is already pretty old technology if you compare it to the lifetime of the new build system which was introduced with this version.
TFS 2015 update 2 has introduced a similar system to the Build pipelines to orchestrate Releases. This doesn't require you to map any workspaces or git repositories and can act on the artefacts of your builds or simply on the contents of file shares.
It makes sense that a Build has to build something and in order to build something, it has to get the things to build. If you're actually not building something, then you're probably deploying or releasing or packaging something else. Hence the distinction between Build and Release pipelines.
TFS 2017+ has an option to disable the syncing of sources. Primarily to allow people to get the sources themselves in creative ways (e.g. a custom powershell script that invokes git.exe).
My primary advice would be to upgrade to TFS 2018 update 3 or at least TFS 2017 update 3.1, worst case TFS 2015 update 4.1. The fact that versions older than update 2015.4.1 have a known XSS scripting security bug may be reason enough to convince your organisation to perform this update.
Barring that option you're left with one solution:
Link your build definition either to a git repository with only a single commit (If I remember correctly the 2015 agent still crashes when syncing an empty Git repo) or link it to a TFVC repository and set the workspace settings to cloak everything. This essentially causes the build to sync an empty folder, which it can cache, before calling your powershell script.
I'm new to version control systems and have been tasked with revamping our company's version control (small system right now). We have library files that will get updated, but we also need to support older versions of these libraries for different generations of our product. Part of my task is to set up an automated unit testing system that will do nightly checkouts, if newer code has been checked in since the last test run.
You will likely need to keep multiple branches of your libraries in source control, one for each version that will be supported/changed in the future. Each of these branches should have a build definition created to build the code and then run the unit tests against the code. The builds can be setup to run in
CI mode which will build on every checkin
Gated checkin mode (my personal favorite) which won't commit the checkin until the build and test run completes successfully.
Our plan is to use Team Foundation Build service to do automatic builds, then use the testing facility to automatically perform testing on the build server then release that build onto the application server.
So far we have
Team Foundation Server with TF Build Controller configured
Build server with win2012, Visual Studio 2013 and Build agent configured.
SQL Server with SQL 2013 installed
Application Server with Win2012 and .netframework installed
My question is what do I need to do to set up automatic builds, and to execute the unit test harness once compilation is successful.
Also the deployment target machine will initially be DEV, however we would like to quickly build for test env and prod etc.
This is what I got so far.
Build Controller (Already set up I believe)
Build Agent (Already installed on build server)
Build Process Template (Do I need to do anything with this. Is this what controls the whole lot)
Team Build Definition (I had a look at this, and it seems to use the build process template)
Drop Folder (I am assuming this is where the executables will be dropped into).
At the moment I have bits and pieces of info, what I would like to know is how this whole thing is hanging together. From the moment the developer wants to do the build to the moment that exe is placed into the DEVAPPSERV (Development application server).
Is anyone able to point me in the right direction or give a summary of what I need to make this happen?
Many thanks,
Dalibor
Install TFS Server (TFS Disk) Create a Team Project Collection and any desired Projects
Install TFS Controller + Agents onto a dedicated machine (TFS Disk) Configure only the build options if on a different machine to the TFS Server
Configure Build Controller to connect to a Specific Team Collection on your TFS Server
Install VS Premium or higher on build machine, if you want code coverage results for your tests
Add some code to TFS Source Control
Create a Build Definition using the default template.
Configure the build definition.
Set the working folder for the build, include only what you need as this will speed up the process
Point the definition to your .sln or proj file.
Ensure testing is enabled and that your test assembly names will match the regex used to identify test dll's i.e. name your test assemblies with the word test.
Set the trigger to be CI or what ever flavour of build you require i.e. gated build
Save the build definition
Trigger a manual build and debug any issues
you should have the basics done and a repeatable build created.
That should cover the basics, you may want to customise the build template (see Ewald Hoffman's guide for tips), you may want to narrow down your code coverage (look for runsettings file info).
If you follow these steps you should be able to get a basic build created and running from these, if you hit any issues you can come back and ask specific questions about a particular area
In order to do automatic builds you should check the CI build option ( under the trigger build option ) and third party automated testing can be run by executed by a post build script.
See the following TFS article about post build scripts.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn376353.aspx
I'm using TFS 2013 on premises. I have four build agents configured on a Build machine. Several build definitions compile ASP .NET websites. I configured the msbuild parameters to deploy the IIS application to the integration server, which sits out there in Rackspace.
By default webdeploy does differential deployments by comparing file dates. In my case that's a big plus because copying files from our network to Rackspace takes quite some time. Now, in order to preserve file dates the build agent has to compile the same base set of source code. On every build only the differential source code yields a new DLL, minimizing the number of files deployed.
All of that works fine, with a caveat: a given build definition has to be assigned to a build agent (by agent name or tag). The problem is I create a lot of contingency when all builds assigned to the same agent are queued up. They wait in line until the previous build is done.
In an ideal world any agent should be able to take care of any build, but the source code being compiled has to be the same, regardless of the agent.
I tried changing the working folder of all agents to point to the same location but I get an error because two agents can't be mapped to the same folder. I guess there is one workspace per agent.
Any ideas?
Finally I found a way to do this. Here are all the changes you need to do:
By default the working folder of each agent is $(SystemDrive)\Builds\$(BuildAgentId)\$(BuildDefinitionPath). That means there's one working folder per BuildAgentId. I changed it so that all Agents share the same folder: $(SystemDrive)\Builds\WorkingFolder\$(BuildDefinitionPath)
By default at runtime the workflow creates a workspace that looks like "[BuildDefinitionId][AgentId][MachineName]". Because all agents share the same working folder there's an error trying to create each separate workspace. The solution to this is in the build definition: Edit the xaml and look for an activity called "Get sources from Team Foundation Version Control". There's a property called WrokspaceName. Since I want to have one workspace per build definition I set that property to the BuildDetail.BuildDefinition.Name.
Save your customized build template and create a build that uses it.
Make sure the option "1. TF VersionControl/1. Clean workspace" is set to False. Otherwise the build will wipe out all the source code on every build.
Make sure the option "2. Build/3. Clean build" is set to false. Otherwise the build will wipeout the output binaries on every build.
With this setup you can queue up the same build on any agent, and all of them will point to the same source code and bin output. When the source code changes only the affected binaries are recompiled. I have a custom step in the template that deploys the output files to IIS, to all the servers in our webfarm, using msdeploy.exe. Now my builds+deployments take one or two minutes, because only the dlls or content that changed during the build are synchronized to the servers.
You can't run two build agents in the same folder. The point of build agents is to run multiple builds in parallel, usually on separate PCs. If you try to run them on the same source code, then (a) it's pointless as two build of exactly the same source should produce identical results, and (b) they are almost certainly going to trip over each other and cause the builds to fail or produce unexpected results.
If you want to be able to build and then deploy a series of versions of your codebase, then there are two options:
if you queue up multiple builds, then the last one will "win", so the intermediate builds are of no real value. So if you check in New code before your first build completes, you may as well stop the active build and start a new one. you should be asking yourself why the build is so slow, or why you are checking in changes so often that this is necessary.
if each build produces an incremental update to the deployed result, then you need to pass the output of your builds to some deployment agent that is able to diff it against the deployed version and send only the changes to be deployed. This could be set up to gather results from multiple build agents if that would be beneficial.
but I wonder if perhaps your build Is slow because you are doing a complete build each time (which cleans the build folder, gets all the sources, and does a full rebuild), when what you want is an incremental build (which gets the latest changes, compiles only what is affected, and complete quickly). perhaps you should investigate making your build incremental.
I have created a lightly customized TFS build process template and also appropriate TFS build definition. It builds fine on the TFS build server.
Is there any way I can allow developers to reuse the same build process XAML and definition to do full builds on their local machines? Maybe there is some utility which can be run with TFS build process XAML files?
I really would like to avoid maintaining a separate copy of the build script for full local rebuilds.
The build templates can only be run by the TFS build service. Without installing that on each developers machine, that might not be the best idea.
An alternative is to setup a share on the developments machine and grant access to the TFS Build account (the one that TFSBuildServiceHost.exe runs on the server as). Then the developer can Queue a build and get the Server to Drop the files onto their machine.
The downside to this is you need a lot of builds to be run on the Agents.