There is something that I cannot really understand during the AWS CodeStar development flow. Let's say I am developing a web app (MVC) locally, it works and now I want to test it remotely before deploying to the final production environment.
CodeStar has created a Git repository for pushing the changes and it automatically starts the building, testing and deployment tasks. I have few questions:
How can I deploy a change to verify that it works BEFORE doing any sort of commit (avoiding to put dirty commits in the case there are some errors) to the remote environment?
How can I DEBUG a remotely ASP.NET application (breakpoints, etc...)?
How can I tell the application to use a different development database (or any other AWS service) while it is in the development "status" ?
Thank you for your delucidations.
Related
I have a droplet in Digital Ocean with Ubuntu 20.04 and a .NET Core web application that connects to Mongo.
My deployment workflow is the following:
I work locally with Visual Studio and release my app to a folder.
Then I connect to my server through FTP and drag the content of my folder to /var/www/myapp
Secrets are managed by Azure (it took me a lot of time to set this up).
A service runs the app and restarts it if needed.
The web server is Nginx
Everything works fine, nothing new so far. However, I'd like to automate each deployment and I found GitLab can run a pipeline to help me achieve that. The problem is I don't understand how to set this up correctly since I've seen there are more partes involved, such as Docker and Kubernetes, and I feel a bit overwhelmed.
Do I need to "dockerize" my application, database, etc.? If I want to add Angular as the client side, do I need to dockerize it as well or it goes in the same container as the .NET Core app?
Do I need Kubernetes? If so, why?
What would be the most straightforward and recommended way of achieving a CI/CD for my app?
It took me a lot of effort to deploy to my Linux server and I'm afraid I can destroy something in production.
I would really appreciate any help.
I am trying to minimize the cost of running my web app in Azure App Service. I have a Visual Studio 2017 solution with two Web Projects: Web and API (both .NET Core). The entire solution is part of a single GitHub Repo. Before adding the API project, the build and deployment to Azure App Service was automated. My goal is to deploy both projects under the same App Service (to minimize cost) with two subdomains (e.g. www.example.com and api.example.com) and keep everything automated.
Is this something that can be done? Can somebody please help me understand how this can be done? Can those settings be commited?
An Azure App Service Plan can contain multiple web apps. Normally when you use the Azure portal to connect it to source control, Kudu (the tool behind App Service Plans), will create a deployment script for that site.
In case you want to deploy two projects of a single solution (and git repo) to different Web Apps you have to do the following:
Create two web apps under the same App Service Plan
Connect both of them to the same git repo for automated deployments
Modify the deployment parameters
I'm going to suppose you know how to do the first two steps.
To modify the deployment parameters, you could either modify the deployment script by downloading it through Kudu and adapting it or, much simpler, configure it through the portal:
Go the App1 => Application Settings => Add setting PROJECT with value
<path>\<path-to-app1>.csproj
Go the App2 => Application Settings => Add setting PROJECT with value <path>\<path-to-app2>.csproj
Every time you push up a change, both web apps will receive an update, but they will deploy a different part to the web site.
More information can be found here (see last paragraph): https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu/wiki/Customizing-deployments
I have solution with startup project that have .ccproj format. This is an Azure project that require Azure SDK installed. By default i am able to run it using IIS Express with Azure storage emulator & Azure compute emulator. But when i make some changes i need to recompile entire solution and re-run it. How can i deploy it in IIS server ? Could you advise me alternative deploy method how to run it in simplest way ?
I want to re-compile and attach to process after make some changes in project without restarting IIS Express & Azure emulators, it takes a lot of time.
#DotNetGoose,
should be able to run on IIS but you will need to abstract all the calls that your code read content from RoleEnvironmental and direct them to read from Web.config, and have a copy of corresponding settings in your web.config.
once the abstraction is done, set your web app as default startup project, you should be able to run them as normal web app on iis or iisexpress.
Is there a way I can deploy my entire website/webapp to an Azure WebRole without the need of Visual Studio?
Context: We have a test environment where there's an IIS hosted web app where our testers test (of course). The thing is, we want to grab that exact tested web app folder and deploy it "as is" to a WebRole.
Please avoid commenting on our procedure, we have been looking at it and we will eventually change it if we have to, I just need a 'simple' yes(how)/no answer.
IIS Web Deploy can be used to package/migrate/restore IIS applications. It can be enabled while deploying a web role as described in this article and allows to update the web role with the application as deployed in your test environment.
Be aware that only single instance cloud services are supported and that in case of a maintenance operation by the fabric controller, your service will be rolled back to the state created by the initial azure package deployment. (There once was a tool for syncing between multi-instance web deployments but sadly that did not work out too well and is no longer supported. Do not attempt to use or rebuild it.)
Installing and Configuring Web Deploy shows the steps to get web deploy for your local testing IIS while articles on using web deploy like this one show examples for calling the tool.
Another option to evaluate are azure websites and git deployment. This could provide you with a documented and reproducible form of deployment that is not prone to unwanted rollbacks while allowing the service to scale to multiple instances. This option might not work out if the application it too tied to the web roles infrastructure or contains code not suitable for the more restricted web sites environment.
A third option to look at is using CSPack as presented in this article. You basically create a service definition and package up the webapp manually without building it in Visual Studio or TFS.
Yes - make sure you have enabled Remote Access on your webrole. Then copy your web app from your local IIS folder to F:\sitesroot\0 (NOTE - may be E:\sitesroot\0 on same web roles).
Yes, you can write a programmatic interface against Web Deploy from your C# code. If you're deploying to Azure Web Sites, you could also use the Windows Azure Management Libraries to spin up new web sites or clouand deploy them.
Does Microsoft offer a tool where you can deploy a web application to multiple web servers in a load-balanced environment/web farm?
My team is looking for a tool, preferably from Microsoft, where we can deploy our web application from development environment to production environment automatically.
If I understanding what your asking for your looking for a build server, to my knowledge Microsoft don't offer one, but some to take a look at are Team City, Hudson(requires a plug-in), and CruiseControl.net.
Basically they work by pulling from your source control building your application and running your tests. They all support scripting that will allow you to build then deploy to your servers. This can be set up to run nightly, weekly, etc. you can also set it up to monitor your source control for changes and build anytime it sees a change
The only one I've used is Team City, the install was easy, and depending on how many build agents you need it's free.
If your just looking to build and deploy from VS Another option is creating an NAnt script and running it from VS as an external tool.
For a good over view of Build servers check out this SOF question cruisecontrol.net vs teamcity for continuous integration
The Web Deployment Team blog at Microsoft has some reasonably useful information, and have a deployment tool you could try...
In the last environment we setup we used TeamCity for all our builds and deployments (Which is basically to say we wrote MSBuild scripts and automated them with TeamCity). In short we had the following 5 build configurations:
Continuous Build - Automatically rebuilt our product upon every check-in. Running all the tests. This build did not deploy anywhere
Nightly Build (Dev) - Automatically build and deployed our product to the development web server (no server farm). We build would run the tests, update the development database, shutdown the Dev IIS web site, copy the necessary files to our web server, and restart the site
Test Build - Like our Nightly build only it deployed to our test environment and it wasn't scheduled so it had to be manually started by logging into Team City and pressing a button
Stage Build - Like test only deployed to a web server that was externally visible to our customers sot that they could validate the application. Also, only run on demand.
Production - Created a zip file of our product that the deployment team could install on our production web servers
So I guess what I'm suggesting is that you use TeamCity and then write build scripts in such a way that they'll deploy to your Web Farm. If you want examples I could supply you with the pertinent portions of our build scripts
** One more thing: we check in our web.config files and such for each environment into subversion and then part of the build process is to copy and rename the appropriate config file for the environment. For example, web.prod.config => web.config in our production build
I believe that Sharepoint does this.
File Replication Service ( e.g. DFS Replication ) is a typical and very good choice for doing this.
Your changes are synced between member servers at the file system level.
Sharepoint does this automatically when you deploy a solution package.