Am very new this kind of S/W development industry and since am here as system engineer, my task is to implement a Build and Release management system using Jenkins. So, far am able to install, configure and even build the war files for my java proj using maven after checking out the sourcecode from my svn. Now the actual task it to build mutliple war file for the same proj for my different environment like UAT, Staging and Prod. I dont want to create multiple jobs, however I would like to use the multi-configuration option to achieve this. So, can anyone please help me in doing this?
Thanks,
Sree
I strongly advise against building environment specific release binaries. Instead address what it is that makes one environment different from another. Generally it is configuration held in property files recording information like:
Database URLs and credentials
System sizing information
..
Baking this into the release makes your software very inflexible. For example why should you have to rebuild your software everytime the database password is changed?
The solution is the use of standards like JNDI. In tomcat you can use context files to set datasources and other variables.
Related
I have a console application where I need some ideas on how to build/release the config part of the application. When running locally in VS the config file is called app.config. After a build the file changes to .exe.config. We are using XDT transformation for building the config file to the different enviroment. But what would be the smartest way to ensure the naming convension is correct when release the build version to a server?
Seems you want to use TFS Build and deploy to multiple environments via Release Management.
For handling configuration in Release Management, there are two techniques generally used Config Per Environment and Tokenization.
If you prefer a clean separation between build and deploy. To achieve that, recommend tokenizing configuration.
More details please take a look at this wonderful blog: Config Per Environment vs Tokenization in Release Management
Environment specific application settings values configured in the app.config are tokenized. Above blog's method essentially inserts tokens into setting values during the build process. When deployed the tokens are replaced with matching Release definition configuration values.
Besides, for an example of a separate build and release solution, you could also take a look at this blog: Using web.config transforms and Release Manager – TFS 2017/Team Services edition (similar to app.config)
I am trying to grasp Release Management vNext and dsc configuration 'management' (how to manage DSC configuration files). In the 'Deploy Using PS/DSC' dialog box while editing a vNext Release Template
Why is PSScriptPath relative?
Does it really mean, that I somehow have to get my scripts I want to use relative to my current drop folder? What is the best way to do achieve this? I want to be able to do:
Have a separate git repository for configuration files
Reuse configuration files across different projects
I've read a promising article Packaging DSC configurations for Visual Studio / TFS Release Management vNext but it seems to be out dated and some kind of hack from my point of view.
How does Microsoft want us to use this? How to achieve reusable configurations in a separate repository?
Thank you
Use a submodule to your separate configuration repository, then ensure the submodule is initialized during the build. You can then copy the configuration scripts to the build drop folder as part of your build script.
The reasoning is that your deployment scripts will evolve over time, and that evolution should be something that is captured. If you ever need to redeploy an old version of your software, that old version shouldn't be deployed using new scripts -- it should be deployed using the same version it used initially.
We have just installed TFS 2015 (Update 1) on-premise and are trying to create a Continuous Integration/Build system using the new TFS Build system. The build works fine, and gives me a green light, but when I look at the default build it has only built the binaries from the bin directory, and there seems to be no easy way to deploy the app on-premise to a local server.
There are two deploy options for a filesystem copy, and a powershell script, and it would certainly be easy enough to use them to copy files to a new server, but since the build only built the binaries, I don't see a tool to gather up the Web artifacts (cshtml, images, scripts, css, etc..) for this.
After an exhaustive google search, I've only found one article which talks about this at:
http://www.deliveron.com/blog/building-websites-team-foundation-build-2015/
However, this uses WebDeploy and creates a rather messy deploy package.
How can I deploy the site (standard MVC web application, in fact my tests are using the default boilerplate site created by the create project wizard) complete with artifacts to a local server in the easiest possible way? I don't want to have to install WebDeploy on the servers, and would rather use PowerShell or something to deploy the final artifacts.
The build is just the standard Visual Studio build template, with 4 steps (Build, Test, Index & Publish, Publish Build Artifacts).
We use "Visual Studio Build" step and as Arguments for MSBuild we use following line:
/p:DeployOnBuild=True /p:PublishProfile=$(DeploymentConfiguration)
On Variables tab page DeploymentConfiguration has to be configured. It must be the Name of the publish Profile (filename of the pubxml file). If the file Name is Build.pubxml the publish profile is Build.
for example:
/p:DeployOnBuild=True /p:PublishProfile=Build
I wanted to add that Ben Day has an excellent write-up that helped us package quickly and then release to multiple environments through Release Manager.
His msbuild arguments look like this:
/p:DeployOnBuild=True /p:DeployDefaultTarget=WebPublish /p:WebPublishMethod=FileSystem /p:DeleteExistingFiles=True /p:publishUrl=$(build.artifactstagingdirectory)\for-deploy\website
The difference between this and the accepted answer is that this parameter set stages everything in an artifacts folder, and then saves it as part of the build. We can then deploy exactly the same code repeatedly.
We capture the web.env.config files alongside the for-deploy folder and then use xdt transforms in the release process to ensure everything gets updated for whichever environment we're deploying to. It works well for all our web projects.
We use WebDeploy/MSDeploy for 40+ applications and love it. We do install WebDeploy on all our servers so we can deploy more easily but you could also use the Web Deploy On Demand feature which doesn't require WebDeploy be pre-installed.
I work in a team which maintains a Java website and back end java jobs and shell script jobs.
After all developers complete their updates, only the relevant ones are committed to source control system.
Later ant build scripts are run and war files are generated.
Along with these war files there will genrally be shell scripts etc to be copied to QA/PROD.
Then one fine day there is a team call the release management team which will transfer the code from our Dev environment to QA/PROD.
Recently I came across the Continuous Integration systems like Jenkins/Hudson.
Can these tools build all the changes committed and automatically transfer my code to QA/PROD.
BTW I work in a AIX Server environment and use Tomcat as the Container.
I am more curious whether the tool will be able to copy my code to QA/PROD.
Please Clarify.
The answer is almost certainly yes, depending on your particular setup for copying the code. There is a large number of plugins for this purposes at the appropriate Jenkins wiki page. You should be able to find something there for your needs.
I have a team foundation server with build server, when I run a build it deploys to a website on that box. However I also want to do the same on Production which is a server on an external network and not part of the same domain.
I thought about looking at TFS Deployer but that just seemed to work within a network, I'm going to test it out as soon as I get a chance but I thought the best idea was to ask here when working with something so critical.
Is it a really bad idea to have a way of easily deploying to production?
Does anyone here deploy to production using whatever method? How do you do it?
Essentially the accepted answer will go to the person who can tell me the best method for achieving a deployment but pointing me in the right direction is sure to get an up vote as long as it's not too obvious.
Depending on the infrastructure you have available to you you can use wix to create msi's and use SMS configuration manager to deploy them to a target collection. This is the direction that we are moving to but have not reached yet. We also integrated wix into our build process to create the MSI artifacts. The reason we wanted to go down this path was because we are using CruiseControl.net as our continuous integration server and we have a nant script that we use to perform both the build process and the deployment process. They are both separate targets in the nant file, but what we wanted was a consistent model of deployment to all environments including production.
What are are doing currently is we are manually moving zips (which are artifacts of our current build process) to production. When the zips are unpackaged in the production environment we have to remove all the web.config, app.config etc from the zips and if we have new entries in the configs they are made manually.
Found msdeploy http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/archive/2008/01/22/welcome-to-the-web-deployment-team-blog.aspx