Ok, so I'm a total newbie to TFS and automated builds. I see how to set up a CI build in TFS pretty easily, along with the drop folder for output files. However, my solution has two UI projects in it. One is our main website, the other is a mobile site.
When developers check in, basically what I want to happen is for a CI build to fire, and then publish the "mobile" project to one server and the "website" project to another.
On a very high level, what steps do I need to take to make this happen? I'm not looking for a detailed explanation, I can Google individual things as needed I just want to know the basic process and what tools are leveraged to make this happen.
The easiest way would be to have two different builds set up to fire on check in.
First, in your configuration manager create two new configurations. One for the Mobile site and another for the main website. The mobile site configuration shouldn't bother to build the website and vice versa.
Then create two builds. For each build, set the 1.Required > Items to Build > Configurations to Build settings to pick the appropriate config to build.
Update your deployment locations as necessary.
Related
My team has TFS build machine building checkins.
Today, we have more than a dozen build definitions to prevent building projects/running test in unaffected areas. This was when we weren't using incremental build.
Now that we enabled incremental sync/build, I am thinking about creating one giant gate definition that include all my team's source code. Since incremental sync/build is enabled, unchanged files don't get built anyway. But TFS is still running all tests.
Is there a way to dynamically pick just test assemblies that were built recently?
I can do it by modifying build template to filter out test assemblies that are more x hrs old but before I go that route, I wanted to check if there is something already available.
thanks
Customizing the template is the right path. Beside the official documentation, take a look at ALM Rangers' Build Customization Guide.
The FindMatchingFiles activity has no date filtering, so you have to roll your own.
I'm starting to dive into TFS 2012 and I have a basic understanding of the tiers and how build servers, controllers and agents work and how different build scripts can have different configurations and projects.
However, one of the things I'm struggling with is a requirement for our source control solution that says that I need to be able to prove a particular changeset or shelfset produced a particular build. That is, given a particular binary, I can point to a release changeset that generated that binary. I should also be able to point to the test changeset that was merged into the release branch. The idea here is not just a separation of duty, but validating that because the release and test changesets are identical, no code was injected into a project by a code reviewer.
I've read one blog post that talks about "Binary promotions" -- would that concept be useful in my situation? I'm having a hard time finding how this binary promotion is set up in TFS.
Deployment
Out of the box TFS doesn't really support deployments, it can deploy to 1 location on build which often is a test server (think lab management). TFS 2012 has built in support for Azure deployments, but they still happen at the end of a build and the build artifacts cannot be automatically deployed to a new location.
You could modify the build template to allow to release to different locations, but that would still be a fresh build for every environment and not true binary promotions.
TFS does, however, have a concept of build quality and actually fires off events when this quality is changed. TFS Deployer is a 3rd party tool that hooks into the quality change event and can execute powershell scripts. This means with a simple change of a dropdown value you can automatically kickoff a script that releases to any environment you want. You can customize the build quality list (per team collection) to be a list of environments (dev, uat, staging, production etc) which the script then figures out where to release the specific build to.
VS2012 also has some nice improvements to web deploy which means deployment configurations are stored in source control with the project, which in theory means they'll be available in the drop folder for TFS Deployer to make use of.
I don't believe TFS keeps a history of build qualities, which means you can't really use the build quality history to maintain a list of what is deployed to which environment. You could fairly easily record this information as part of the deployment script though. Or at the very least add a custom summary node to the build with information about the release.
TFS2012 does have the ability to mark a build as deployed as part of the Azure deployment functionality, you mark tfs deployer builds as deployed using a script but it doesn't feel very useful.
Octopus Deploy is another project that's worth checking out, and could be used instead of TFS Deployer if your build template creates NuGet packages. It requires a bit more control over the production hardware as you need to install agents on each environment to handle releases, but it solves a lot of other issues with deployment.
Versioning
Once you have a nice consistent way of automatically releasing that people don't bypass, you can look at enhancing the build template to inject the build version, or changeset number as the assembly version for anything built as part of that automated build. There's a number of different ways to do it and plenty of blog posts and tools to help you achieve that.
Alternatively you could just use automatic assembly versioning ([assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.*")]) to give you the date/time the build occurred, which ends up like 1.0.1234.123 where 1234 is something like the days since jan 1st 2000, and 123 is the minutes since midnight (my specifics may be wrong here).
If you're deploying websites, then I highly recommend injecting the current build version into the html somewhere. This way you can check what version a website is running without needing access to the bin directory. It can also be appended as a querystring to css/js file imports to ensure no browser caching occurs between versions.
Thoughts
Personally I'm hoping Microsoft realise that the xaml build workflows are trying to do too much and that they split the different concerns (build, test, deployment...) into different scriptable parts. Of course that would not be until the next major release of TFS which is years away. Although with Team Foundation Service they are trying to iterate a lot quicker, so they may actually extend the Azure deployment stuff into something more useful in the nearer future.
So, we're using continuous integration in our current Team Foundation Server 2010 setup, and so far it's working great. We're doing shelvesets, the build is running on the Build Manager in TFS, and it's also running our MSTest unit tests for us.
My question is, and I can't seem to find any information on this, is how to move the "build unit" that is created by the Build Manager on TFS to another server?
Aka, how do I "promote" this build to our QA, staging, etc... environments?
Before, we've were using VS2010's Publish Web feature, which allows us to set up publish "profiles", and each profile can have a different web.config related to it. This is really useful for anything we keep in our config files, like db connection strings, paths to app servers, etc... changing automatically based on our Publish Profile. We choose the profile, build locally, then use the "Publish" button to move the entire app to another server.
This setup worked great for when there were two of us working, and we were using TFS for just its source repository, but now the builds are happening on the TFS server.
What I'm looking for is a way for when TFS does the build for us (it's no longer being done locally on our machine, but by TFS Build Manager) to:
take into account which "publish profile" to use. This will effect what web.config is used and other items you can associate with a profile in your IDE.
once the build is created, to find a way to "push" the build to one of our other servers (QA, Staging, production) FROM TFS.
I don't even know if that is possible or not. Maybe it's still a manual job to take the build created on TFS, and copy it over by hand, and unzip the project/files into the correct file path on the deployed server? Or maybe it's part of the workflow in TFS, and I still have yet to find it.
This is surely possible already from TFS. Read the posts from Vishal Joshi on this topic, starting with: http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2011/07/documenting-key-end-to-end-deployment.html
The solution I came up with is I wrote my own build handler for TFS, and use that code to push builds to our different environments. Here is the link I used to help me: http://geekswithblogs.net/jakob/archive/2010/10/27/devleoping-and-debugging-server-side-event-handlers-in-tfs-2010.aspx.
If anyone wants more specifics, just contact me and I'll be glad to help you.
I'm currently working on creating a build template for TFS2010 builds. However, I notice that I'm currently 'spamming' the source control with every change I make to the template (and lots more for all the fixes for those changes).
I wonder what the easiest way is to test the build templates I'm creating?
Is there a way to change the template file and custom activity dlls that doesn't involve checking them in?
I currently have a build controller and agent running on my developer machine, which I'm using to test the template (test = start a build and hope for less errors than last time).
Why is 'spamming' a problem? Anyway, I have a separate Team Project for doing this kind of work, that way I can check in to my hearts content without affecting the developers who need to have a stable build. once I've done my testing I check the template in to the team project(s) used by the developers.
I want to test my builds against the teams latest code-base without having to branch it over to a trial project.
Instead, I do the following:
Create a separate build definition called 'Infrastructure'
clone a production definition
Set the trigger on the Infrastructure build definition to manual.
Set the Infrastructure definitions permissions to allow only [Project]\Build group members to have full control of it.
keeps the notification of broken builds away from the bulk of the team).
Create a separate build process template, called 'Infrastructure.xaml'.
Point the Infrastructure build definition at the Infrastructure process template.
Now when I want to iterate on a new build feature for the team:
Check out the build process template I want to update, and lock it.
Copy the build process template I want to update overtop of the Infrastructure.xaml.
Add my build feature to the Infrastructure.xaml file, and check that in.
Use the Infrastructure build definition to test my changes.
Iterate over 3-4 until I get it right.
Complete the feature and have my changes verified by another Infrastructure team member.
Copy Infrastructure.xaml over the build process template I locked in (1) and check it in.
This still results in 'spam' in the TFS source control, but it keeps the build definition iteration out of the eyes of the team. My build process templates are located out of the main source tree (under the Build Process Templates folder, or in the branches themselves under a 'Core/Build' folder where no-one else on the team is typically paying any attention) so that the team is largely unaffected by it.
#d3r3kk: Why not just branch the template and merge changes back when ready instead of creating copies? That way you can preserve source history in a cleaner way as well.
Ideally, there should be a way to have a build process template that is in progress by having it on your local file system and pointing the build definition to it temporarily. Not sure if something like this exists in later versions of VS/TFS. I haven't seen it available via the UI anyway.
I am preparing to move my team's source control from VSS over to TFS 2008.
This is for an asp.net website, and I am currently using a combination of nant scripts and Cruise Control to do all of the builds and deployments.
I've been trying to wrap my head around the best way to architect TFS build to do the same thing I'm doing with NANT and Cruise Control, but I can't determine the best approach.
Here are my requirements:
When code reaches a certain point, I manually apply a label to it.
This labeled code needs to be built and deployed to any of our 25 different Dev, QA, or production environments.
Any of these 25 environments can be on any current or past labeled version of the application.
I need to be able to deploy any labeled version of the application to any of the environments.
I'm currently accomplishing the above using NANT to perform the build, and using Cruise Control to just pass in command line options for which environment(s) to build and deploy. I have a Nant config file with a list of all of my environments, and an associated label each environment should currently be using. This file gets manually updated whenever a new label is created.
I know the approach I'm using for NANT probably won't be the same as with Team Build, but has anyone done something similar with Team Build and could share how you accomplished it?
Labeling in TFS is much more robust than in VSS. When you create a label, you can create based on a changeset, date, workspace version, heck even a different label. (BTW, I was grabbing a link and came across this post that you might find relevant.)
By default, a Team Build will build from the latest version of code in source, but you can override the "CoreGet" target in a build to build a specific version. Aaron Hallberg (a.k.a. TFS's John Skeet) shows an example here.
see 4.
I haven't personally had this difficult of a requirement, but I've done something similar. When you queue the build, you can pass in any number of parameters in a couple important ways, 1) through the response file and 2) at queue time (simple example here). In either case, two parameters could be which environment and which label/version number. At my current project, I have continuous integration turned on, so when code in a workspace is checked in, the current code is automatically labeled, pull the specifics for my drop location from the response file, then deploy to the respective location.
Given the fact that you have ~25 environments and n number of versions/labels, you could build a simple GUI that reads the current labels through the TFS API and lets you pick which version to build to a particular environment.
To answer the question, the way I addressed this was to use a combination of a custom build task, cruise control, and msbuild.
The custom build task allowed me to get the latest version from a specific branch and label.
Cruise control allowed me to pass in specific information for a specific build to MSbuild, using a config file, but initiate the build from a UI.
msbuild was used like normal, however it was called from cruise control, and the custom build task did most of the work.