I am attempting to setup automated tests for our applications using a virtual machine environment.
What I would like to have is something like the following scenario:
Build server is automatically triggered to start an automated test for the application
A "build" script is then run which consist of:
Copy application files and a test script to a location accessible by the VM
Start the VM
In the VM, a special application looks in the shared folder and start the test script
The tests script do its job, results are output to shared folder
Test script ends
The special application then delete the test script
The special application somehow have the VM manager close the VM and revert to the previous snapshot
When the VM has exited, process the result and send to build server.
I am using TeamCity if that matters.
For virtual machines, we use VirtualBox but we are open to any other if needed.
Is there any applications/suite that would manage this scenario?
If there are none then I would then code it myself, should be easy but the only part I am not sure is the handling of the virtual machine.
What I need to be able to do is to have the VM close itself after the test and revert to a previous snapshot since I want it to be in a known state for the next test.
Any pointers?
I have a similar setup running and I chose to use Vagrant as its the same thing our developers where using for normalizing the development environment.
The initial state of the virtualmachine was scripted using puppet, but we didn't run the deployment scripts from scratch on each test, only once a day.
You could use puppet/chef for everything, but for all other operations on the VM, we would use Fabric scripts, as they were used for the real deployment too, and somehow fitted how we worked better. In sum the script would look something like the following:
vagrant up # fire up the vm, and run the puppet provisioning tool
fab vm run_test # run tests on vm
fab local process_result # process results on local shared folder
vagrant destroy # destroy the vm
The advantage is that your developers can also use vagrant to mimic your production environment without having to take care of that themselves (i.e. changes to your database settings get synced to all your developers vm's wherever they are) and the same scripts can be used in production too.
VirtualBox does have a COM API. I have no experience with it, but it may be possible to use that. One option would be to have TeamCity fire off a script to do this. I'd suggest starting with NAnt (supported natively by TeamCity) and possibly executing PowerShell if necessary.
Though I don't have any experience with either, I happen to have heard of a couple applications in this space recently:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/virtual_machine_test_harness
http://www.automatedqa.com/techpapers/testcomplete/automated-testing-in-virtual-labs/
Related
I am using Meteor server v1.8.
I want to create a backup server.
If Main server goes down, users should automatically transferred to a backup server, to avoid any down time.
How can I achieve such behaviour.
Thanks in advance.
You could use process spawning tools like Phusion Passenger to make your application failsafe. If you app crashes, Passenger restarts it immediately.
Some resources on that:
https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Phusion-Passenger:-Meteor-tutorial
https://www.phusionpassenger.com/docs/tutorials/installation/meteor/
Or use some container orchestration and make your app available on more than one machines. If one instance fails, your app should still be available.
In both cases: install your mongodb on a separate server. This is also why you need to define the MONGO_URL environment variable on your Meteor deployment, so your app process is separated from the Database process.
In such a setup you won't need to "submit" data on failure to a separate server, which I think might even not be a realistic approach in a production environment.
As we all know, we can run a meteor app by just typing meteor in a terminal.
By default it will start a server and use port 3000.
So why do I need to deploy it using MUP etc.
I can configure it to use port 80 or use nginx to route to port 80 for the app. So the port is not the point.
Edit:
Assume meteor is running on a VPS or cloud server with public IP address, not a personal computer.
MUP does a few extra things you can do yourself:
it 'bundles' the code into a single file, using meteor build bundle
the javascript is one file, and css another; it's minified, and obfuscated so it's smaller and faster to load, and less easy to decipher on the client.
some packages are also meant to be removed when running in production. For example meteorToys, the utility toolset to look up collections and much more, is not bundled into the production bundle, as per the instructions in its package. This insures you don't deploy code with security vulnerabilities (Meteor toys basically opens up client side delete / updates etc... if you're not careful)
So, in short, it installs a minimal version of your site, making sure that what's meant for development only doesn't get push to a production environment.
EDIT: On other reason to do this, is that you don't need all the Meteor build tools on your production server; that can add up to a lot of stuff, especially if you keep caches going for a while...
I believe it also takes care of hooking up to a remote MongoDB Instance (at least it used to be the case on the free meteor site) which is more scalable and fault tolerant than running on the same instance as the web server, as well as provision storage etc... if needed.
basically, to deploy a Meteor app yourself manually, you need to:
on your dev box:
meteor build bundle your app to a tar file (using the architecture flag corresponding to the OS you will use)
on the server:
install node v0.10 (or whatever is the current version of node required by Meteor)
you might have to install Fiber#1.0.5 (but I believe this is now part of meteor install already)
untar the bundle, get into bundle/programs/server/ and run npm install
run the server with node main.js in the bundle folder.
The purpose of deploying an application is that you are situating your project on hardware outside of your local machine. For example if you deploy an application on Heroku app you create a repository on heroku's systems and that code based is used to serve your application off of their servers.
If you just start an application on your personal system, you will suffer a lack of network and resource availability as well as under use of computer time at non-peak hours as your system will need to remain attentive for additional users without having alternative tasks. Hosting providers provide resources as needed, and their diverse client base allows their systems to work around the clock on a global scale.
I'm newbie for these techs (open stack / docker / vagrant), not sure if I understood them correctly (most likely did not), for me I understood it is something like having a portable application to run it with same development configuration to ensure all the development team have same setup, but did not understand, what after development, and how to get benefit from them with dart app.
my question is:
1. Correct my understanding
2. Do I need the end user to have these things installed in his system, and run my application through them, same as in the development stage?
3. How can I build/develop/distribute dart lang app through them, may be as hese as well as dart are new, I could not find enough info while googling.
thanks
Docker is similar to a virtual machine like VM-Ware or Virtualbox as it creates an abstraction layer between the host operating system and the operating system running within a Docker container. The difference is that Docker doesn't emulate the entire hardware. The disadvantage is that Docker only runs on Linux and only Linux can be run inside Docker. If your host is an Intel system you can't run an ARM Linux inside the container. (theoretically you can run Virtualbox inside Docker and run Windows. or other OSes in it)
With Docker you can test your application locally in the same environment as the application will run when deployed.
When you for example create an application you want to run in Google Compute Engine you install and test it locally inside a Docker container and then deploy the Docker container to Google Compute Engine as a whole unit. When there is a bug in the deployed application you should be able to reproduce it locally as well because it's just a 1:1 copy. No bug could have been introduce because the operating system or other dependencies were installed differently on the deployment environment than in the develeopment/test environment.
The Dockerfile is a set of instructions to set up a Docker container. If you want to create a new Docker container (for example for a new developer) you just let Docker process the Dockerfile and a new Docker container is created from it. This allows to easily create new Containers.
If you want to update one dependency to a newer version or want to add remove components to/from the environment you change the Dockerfile and create a new container from it. This way you avoid that manual addition/removal form/to an existing container manually lets containers of different developers/testers/deployment diverge from each other.
I haven't used OpenStack myself but from the web page it seems to provide components and tools to build and manage your own cloud infrastructure.
I also haven't used Vagrant myself but it seems to help to automate a lot of tasks related to creating and managing virtual machines like VM-Ware, Virtualbox, Docker and probably others.
When you have for example a server application it probably consist of a number of components you don't want all to run in one container but split up into several containers. One container for the Database, one for the web server, one for the backend application (created in Dart for example), and others. It can become cumbersome to manage all those containers. Vagrant helps to automate related tasks.
My company uses VS2012 for web development, ADFS2.0 for identity management, and various database setups. Right now, we have multiple branches for web: dev, test, and prod. What we want to do is have a system in place that fully automates deployment from TFS to our dev/test/prod environments, a sort of one click process that will kick off a build, and then deploy the build to the proper environment. I have looked at MSDeploy, along with some others, but we are limited on what we can use because of security/legal reasons. Is there any way to get this done? I will explain a bit further:
We have a share on our network that holds "master" copies of each environment(dev, test, prod). People work on code locally on their machines from the dev environment, then when done, they check it in to the dev environment. We currently have to manually kick off a build(which I know can be automated), then we have to let our admins know to deploy that to the right spots on the servers(which I know can also be automated). Is there a way to set up some sort of hook to automatically deploy builds that have been kicked off?
You can try commercial options like http://octopusdeploy.com/ or http://www.red-gate.com/delivery/deployment-manager/ or http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/inrelease/ ( soon to be integrated with tfs) otherwise you can achieve the same with MS deploy and powershellscript which needs more development time.
I am just starting to get my head wrapped around continuous deployment with Jenkins, but I am running into some roadblocks and I haven't really found very many good, definitive resources on the topic in regards to ASP.NET applications.
I have set up a local build server than successfully pulls down code from a SVN repo, and builds it OK with MSBuild. This works well so far, but now I'd like to automate pushing this compiled code to a development server.
My problem is this - from what I gather based on what I read (which may be an incorrect assumption...) is that the staging server is typically within the same network as the build server, meaning you can share network resources, servers, etc.
In my case, I want to run the Jenkins server on a remote VPS, then deploy to other remote VPSes (so, essentially individual isolated machines communicating with each other).
I have seen alot of terms, but I am very new in my Sys Admin / DevOps type skills.
So, my question is this:
Is it even possible to, using Jenkins on a VPS, to then deploy to any particular server I choose? (I have full access to all of them, so if its a security thing, I can fix that... but they are not within the same network/domain)
What is the method to achieve this? I've seen xcopy, Web Deployment Packages (msdeploy), batch scripts, etc. mentioned, but not really a guidance behind what to use in what situations. Are any of these methods useful to achieve my goal?
Thanks for any help or guidance!
How is your Powershell? ;) You should check out psake.
psake is a build automation tool written in PowerShell. It avoids the
angle-bracket tax associated with executable XML by leveraging the
PowerShell syntax in your build scripts. psake has a syntax inspired
by rake (aka make in Ruby) and bake (aka make in Boo), but is easier
to script because it leverages your existent command-line knowledge.
psake is pronounced sake – as in Japanese rice wine. It does NOT rhyme
with make, bake, or rake.
You can deploy your files to the target server through SSH. Jenkins do support transfers through SSH. All you need to do is setting up a SSH server ex : CopSSH and a user account with admin permissions. and configuring the Jenkins to transfer through SSH.
Create host configurations in the main Jenkins configuration
Add an SSH Server
Add the public key to the remote server (the build server)
Click "Test Configuration"
Save
Configure a job to Publish Over SSH (Post Build Action)
Add Transfer Set.
Refer Publish Over SSH For More details