I am using OctoPack in my asp.net project to package for deployment to my environments. I noticed that OctoPack is packaging all the web.config transformation files in the package. How do I get it to transform into the one web.config so that they are not all sent to all environments?
Note: I would like to keep the default behavior of not setting up a nuspec file if possible.
Transformation is not done by OctoPack but by Octopus Deploy during the deployment.
I will assume you're using Octopus Deploy. If your Nuget package contains the transform files (like f.ex. Web.Release.config) then all you need to do is to goto your projects Process and the relevant step, click the Features link and enable Config transforms. You will have new options where you can also specify additional transforms you want to run.
More details under "Config transformations" here http://docs.octopusdeploy.com/display/OD/Configuration+files
Related
I am trying to understand how the appsettings.json and appsettings.{Environment}.json and the environment variables play along in a dotnet core 2.1 application but I don't know how at runtime the appsettings (whatever the final transformation is) are accessed by the application.
I would expect to have the appsettings among the compiled dll (e.g: MyWebApiApp\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.1), but I don't see it there.
Understanding this would help me find out the best approach for OpenShift configmaps vs appsettings, because I need to know whether I should rely on appsettings at runtime or whether appsettings is something useful for development but on production I should rely on environment variables rather.
Thanks!
Are you running the code from within Visual Studio? The default CreateDefaultBuilder uses the Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() to determine which folder to load the settings files from. When you are running from within Visual Studio the current directory is your project directory - so when you run/debug the program it finds the correct settings file.
One way to test this is to change to a command line and run your applications using dotnet myapp.dll. If you are loading settings from an appsettings file it will not find the file and the settings will be null.
If you change the properties on your appsettings file to copy if newer and rebuild your app, when you run it from the command line it will correctly find the settings file.
You can take a look at the how the webhost determines which settings to use by looking at the implementation file. But, in short, dotnetcore will use settings in the following order:
appsettings.json
environment variables
command line
The documentation for this is here
So, if there are settings that could change once the app is deployed then you can overwrite them via environment variables. You could redeploy the appsettings files if you want to configure that way but, from my experience, it is much easier to handle production settings via environment variables, possibly using a third party tool e.g. puppet.
Hope that helps.
I'm wanting to know how to perform the following
Build & package an ASP.NET website to the file system
Be able to deploy the website to one or more environments. I want to the transforms of config file to happen at the point of deployment, rather than at the point of building. This way my code is not recompiled for each deployment and there is not risk of new changes being introduced.
From my own reading I'm unsure of how to do this. WebDeploy seems to package, transform and deploy based on a configuration but Im unsure how these steps can be decoupled to avoid the need to recompile code from source control.
Does anyone have any experience in solving this issue?
You can use the Parameterization feature of web deploy a.k.a MSDeploy. You will need to use a parameters.xml file and a setParameters.xml file to dynamically swap out settings since you are not transforming your package at build time.
At deployment time you can pass in any .xml file to set the parameters you have specified in the parameters.xml file. Since the parameters.xml is at the root of your project solution (e.g see example link of where to place the file) then at build time it gets baked into your web package. However, you now have the flexibility to change those values by passing in the setParms .xml file from the command line during deployment. This is different than transforming the values during build time based on configuration settings.
Here is a msdeploy command line example of passing in a ParamFile for a staging environment.
msdeploy -verb:sync -source:package="c:\packages\mypackage.zip" -dest:auto,computername=StagingServer1 -setParamFile="c:\StagingParameters.xml"
See the below links for examples and MSDN technical information:
Web Deploy Parameterization in Action
Parameterization vs. Web.Config Transformation
Web Deploy Operation Settings
Similar question on stackoverflow that provides several methods
I'm sure this question has come up before, but I can't seem to find an elegant solution.
I have a web application project with multiple configurations based on deployment environment (Test, QA, Production) along with web.config transforms for each environment. We are using a web deployment package to automatically create the .zip of the app which can be deployed via MSDeploy. It's easy enough to call the package target multiple times, each with a different configuration:
msbuild MyProject.csproj /t:Package /p:Configuration=QA
msbuild MyProject.csproj /t:Package /p:Configuration=Test
But this triggers a complete rebuild of the web project each time before packaging. I want to build once, then apply the web.config transforms, and create separate packages for each environment. Is there an easy way to accomplish this without forcing a complete rebuild for each environment?
Dupe of Build once and deploy to multiple environments with msdeploy & Visual Studio 2012
I've also been wanting a solution to this, but apparently there isn't any real COMPLETE MS solution that I know of. Visual Studio provides the following (as noted here):
Web.Config transformation
Parameterization
Vishal Joshi concluded with the following:
If you can know your environment settings during build time use
Web.Config transformation.
If you would want to create deployment package only once and then
enter the settings during install time then use Parameters.xml
What I would like to see, though, is have the best of both worlds. I want to "package" up a target having ALL the configuration transformations embedded. Therefore, when the IT guy runs the WebDeploy cmd file (that gets generated when you "package"), they can provide a switch of which environment configuration they want (i.e. Dev, Test, Stage, Prod, Release, etc). I don't believe there is a solution from MS out there that does that. :(
I have a website with lots of files using team build and deploying though web deploy packages. The problem i am having is that the packages are build from one of the machines from the farm and the time stamp will not always match. By default with web deploy that means a full site roll and with so many file and the sync across the cluster this is not optimal.
With cmd line deploy i can pass -UseCheckSum and this is solved for manual deployment. Now i'm trying to use a CI build with auto deploy and passing MSbuild arguments though my build setup. Is there a way to get this to deploy in the same manner?
You can't do it in your MSBuild, but you can edit the Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets file on the build server to apply -UseChecksum.
See my answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13863041/8037
UPDATE: MS has added the ability to pass the UseChecksum flag to VS 2013. To do this, add the following property to the .pubxml file:
<MSDeployUseChecksum>true</MSDeployUseChecksum>
Further information can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2013/10/30/web-publishing-updates-for-app-offline-and-usechecksum.aspx
If, by "MSBuild" you mean the Web Publishing Pipeline, then the answer is no. The MSDeploy msbuild task supports a UseChecksum property, but the WPP targets provide no mechanism through which you can set it. This is also true of a number of other features (like stored credentials).
I'm using Microsoft Web Deploy to publish and update my site. (script is generated with Visual Studio). This tool removes auto-generated files and folders on update, as they are not included into install package. How to make it keep these files?
The Web Deploy command line tool has two switches that may be useful: -skip and -enableRule:DoNotDeleteRule. For information on -skip, see Web Deploy Operation Settings, and for DoNotDeleteRule, see Web Deploy Rules.
In Visual Studio, you may be able to tweak the deploy.cmd file to use these to achieve what you want. For more information, see How to: Install a Deployment Package Using the deploy.cmd File.
Having to edit the deploy.cmd files each time you generate them is a pain. I am using VS2017 and found I can set an environment variable on the server and deploy.cmd will use it. The deploy readme file says it:
Alternatively, you can specify additional flags by setting the
"_MsDeployAdditionalFlags" environment variable. These settings are
used by this batch file.
So on the server I created the environment variable:
_MsDeployAdditionalFlags=-enableRule:DoNotDeleteRule
And that did it. It now adds the rule each deploy on the server.