what is the preferred method of deploying a web project? Just copy the dll's after compiling in release mode and registering them? or using NSIS to build an installer or the MS set up project.
I usually use a Web Deployment Project per WebSite or WebApplication, it allows me to manage build configurations, merging, and define pre-post build MSBuild tasks.
You can also take a look to the Microsoft Web Application Installer, it will be really nice, but it still in beta stage, however you can try it...
This depends greatly on where your webapp is going and the experience you wish to provide.
If you deploy to a web host its best to use xcopy deploy and documentation. If you have a real end system its simpler to create an installer to do all the leg work for your customers and maybe save your self some documentation work.
I would recommend investing in setting up a continuous integration process (CruiseControl.Net or TeamCity etc...) As you are probably not only going to deploy it to your customer only once.
Having an automatic deploy at the push of a button is a Godsend. If you invest a few days you can have automatic deploy to a dev-environment every time someone checks in code (and it compiles and all tests pass), set up daily deploys to a test environment and have a button to automatically deploy it to a staging environment whenever you want.
Andreas, I am in the process of getting CC.Net. In the meanwhile, I am using the Web Deployment Project. Using this and going through the set up, it creates a 'release' folder with a bin folder conntaining dll's and also the aspx in the parent folder.
I assume I can now create an MSI file using the 'release' folder or do i need to do something different to create an MSI which i can run on the client server
Related
I have a standard way of working for building and deploying my asp .net applications on a build server (usually Jenkins). I have a custom build script and publish profile that builds my solution, copies some files and publishes the web project all with a single call to MSBuild.
I am trying to recreate this in Azure DevOps. My first obstacle seems to be that build and "publish" (or "release" in DevOps parlance) are separate steps. But it also seems like maybe I don't need to "publish"?
So
How do I control what ends up in the "artifacts" folder of the build? Is that through Azure? Can I do it with a .MSBuild file? And
Do I even need the concept of "publish" or does the release step just copy all artifacts to the destination (a VM in this case)? Can I control what gets deployed?
I am having a hard time finding some kind of basic tutorial that cover asp .net projects being deployed this way.
How do I control what ends up in the "artifacts" folder of the build? Is that through Azure? Can I do it with a .MSBuild file?
Yes, we could use the MSBuild Arguments parameter /p:PackageLocation=$(build.artifactstagingdirectory) to control what ends up in the "artifacts" folder.
When we use the task Visual Studio build to build the project, we could edit the MSBuild Arguments parameter to be like: /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=Test /p:PackageLocation=$(build.artifactstagingdirectory)
Then we could use Publish Build Artifacts task to publish build artifacts to Azure Pipelines, TFS, or a file share.
Do I even need the concept of "publish" or does the release step just copy all artifacts to the destination (a VM in this case)? Can I control what gets deployed?
Yes, you can simply understand the release step just copy artifacts to the destination. If you want to control what gets deployed, you can filter the artifacts when you use the copy task with contents.
Check the article Deploying Web Applications Using Team Build and Release Management for the details.
Hope this helps.
If you have existing scripts that work, just use those :). The new YAML builds are moving slowly away from fully featured UI tasks with lots of logic to more bare bones scripts that do what is needed.
It is a common practice though to split build from publish. That way you can put in additional checks, reviews and approvers on the release stage.
In your case it would mean:
Build stage
Use MsBuild to build & create a publish package either in the form of a folder or a zip file.
Use the Publish Pipeline Artifact task to store this folder or zip file
Release stage
Use the Download Pipeline Artifact task to restore the file to publish
Optionally use a Infra as Code tool to prep the target environment.
Use msdeploy.exe or another tool to publish the package. Optionally generate and pass in a settings file to override certain settings.
This way you can have multiple release stages to generate test environments, temporary POC environments etc by simply using another set of variables and/or settings override file.
There are special tasks in Azure Pipelines that wrap around these tools and provide an easy to use UI and some additional logic. These can be very useful if you don't have intimate knowledge of the commandline tools. If you do know your way around them, there may not be a very strong reason to use the fancy tasks.
I have an ASP.NET web site - aka, I don't need to build the project and deploy dlls along with the project, I just place the .aspx and .aspx.cs files on my web server and things are compiled automatically.
I would like to setup TeamCity as a continuous integration server for this project so that it will only deploy the files that were checked in rather than updating every file in the project when I leave a specifically formatted comment during checkin.
So far I was able to setup a build trigger that only fires if the comment is formatted correctly, but I can't find a way to tell TeamCity to only deploy the files that have been checked in rather than the entire project.
Can this be done? If so, can someone point me in the right direction?
I would use Microsoft's WebDeploy. It will automatically deploy only the files that have changed.
Troy Hunt's guide to setting up build and deployment in Team City along with WebDeploy is an excellent place to start:
http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/11/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity.html
Also, if you prefer a more manual approach, you could use RoboCopy to do a sync:
http://itbloggertips.com/2013/05/robocopy-command-copy-only-new-changed-files-sync-both-the-drive/
I've been doing some reading http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2010/11/team-build-web-deployment-web-deploy-vs.html and https://michaelbaylon.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/managing-sql-scripts-and-continuous-integration/ ... etc on automated deployment and continuous integration etc but non of it seems to talk about automated deployment in a classic asp environment and you can't really do proper CI unless you get into automated deployment.
Can MSDeploy deploy a classic asp website? If not ... is it best to just write a build script that copies all the files over to the correct folder and then start up IIS? I've done this using msbuild and the robocopy msbuild extension task. But then how do you handle the different environments (QA, dev, staging, production) there's no web config to put the different connection strings etc ... supposedly msbuild is configuration aware ... but how does that work when there is no web config?
So with all these questions I'm struggling to really move forward with creating a deployment script / module / exe for our classic asp website. Does anyone have any answers / resources / further questions that they can point me in the direction of?
Web Deploy (http://www.iis.net/download/WebDeploy) is the way to go. You just have to customize the deployment script for different environments.
You might find this links helpful:- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241740.aspx- "Build" Classic ASP with TFS 2010
MSDEPLOY can deploy anything that can live in IIS. You can create a package from the existing web site, and examine it to see what got packaged. You should be able to use that to determine how to package up your site from sources.
You should even be able to create a Visual Studio project from your sources so that you can use the Web Publishing Pipeline directly. The fact that there is nothing there to compile shouldn't stop you from specifying that your .ASP files are content files.
Checkout using cruisecontrol.net, we use that for our automated deploys along with msbuild and it works great. We are a .Net shop but it's basically the same thing. Cruise Control can run scripts and does handle the web.config / global.asa transformations pretty good. As long as you can script it cruise control could handle it.
Depending on your development environment you might be able to hook it into cruisecontrol. We use TFS and it integrates nicely so when we check items into our different branches (Dev, Main, Stage) it auto deploys the site to the appropriate location.
Deploying to our production environment we use MSbuild to move the code. Since it's in another network location we needed something that could go outside and do any server updates necessary.
http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
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.
When I build my ASP.NET web application I get a .dll file with the code for the website in it (which is great) but the website also needs all the .aspx files and friends, and these need to be placed in the correct directory structure. How can I get this all in one directory as the result of each build? Trying to pick the right files out of the source directory is a pain.
The end result should be xcopy deployable.
Update: I don't want to have to manually use the Publish command which I'm aware of. I want the full set of files required by the application to be the build output - this means I also get the full set of files in one place from running MSBuild.
One solution appears to be Web Deployment Projects (WDPs), an add-on for Visual Studio (and msbuild) available that builds a web project to a directory and can optionally merge assemblies and alter the web.config file. The output of building a WDP is all the files necessary to deploy the site in one directory.
More information about Web Deployment Projects:
Announcement on webdevtools MSDN blog for WDP 2008
ScottGu introduction to WDP 2005
The only disadvantage to this solution is the requirement on an add-on which must be available on the build machine. Still, it's good enough for now!
ASP.NET doesn't have real xcopy deployment for new sites. It depends on having a virtual directory/Application in IIS. However, once that virtual directory is created you can use xcopy for updates.
You can Publish Web site..If you want to automate your deployment, you need to use some script.
Have you tried using the aspnet_compiler.exe in your .net framework directory? I'm pretty sure you can create a "deploy ready" version of a web application or web site.
The _CopyWebApplication target on MSBuild will do exactly what you need. The catch is that only the main assembly will be copied to the bin folder and that's why a copy task is needed to also copy any other file on the bin folder.
I was trying to post the sample script as part of this post but wasn't able to.
Please take a look at this article on my blog that describes how to create a MSBuild script similar to the one you need.
Have you tried right clicking the website in Solution Explorer and clicking 'Publish Website'?
Build --> Publish
A dialog box will appear that will guide you through the process.
For the automated building you describe in the update, I would recommend you look into MSBuild and CruiseControl.NET
It depends on how complicated solution you need, you could just use a script and jenkins for example. You can use MSBUild with Jenkins for just deploying to an IIS. And if you got Jenkins other tools is pretty easy to connect into it later on. But if you just want to build, use a script that jenins execute every build that uses MSDeploy and it will work great.
This is how i do it, just to give you a feeling:
Sonarqube uses Gallio, Gendarme, FXcop, Stylecop, NDepths and PartCover to get your metrics and all this is pretty straight forward since SonarQube do this automatically without much configuration.
Here is Jenkins witch builds and get Sonar metrics and a another job for deploying automatically to IIS. I use a simple script one line that calls my MSBuild and wich URL, pass and user.
And Sonarqube, all metrics for my project. This is a simple MVC4 app, but it works great!:
If you want more information can i provide you with a good guide.
This whole setup uses MSBuild, too build and deploy the apps.