In Azure DevOps, there are separate pipelines for Build and Releases. Single build (build artifacts) can be released to multiple environment with different triggers.
E.g. when build is comoleted, it triggers release to Test env. When it is approved, release to another env with different parameters is triggered.
What's the GitHubs way of deploying single build artifacts to multiple environments?
There currently is no direct equivalent.
It can be modeled using multiple github actions or multiple dependent jobs in the same action. But it's not the same thing.
Some folks have been very creative with the build action creating an Issue and waiting for a LGTM comment from specific other people to trigger a new action. You can use releases or packages to store the build output.
I guessing something will come in the future, but for now, if you want environments, stages, approvals etc. Then keep using Azure Pipelines with GitHub.
I'm on a project that uses Mulesofts Anypoint studio for API development. Anypoint studio uses Maven to build its projects and handle versioning. Currently we are using a Git-flow branching model without release branches (feature/development/master) and the CI tool is Jenkins. We want to migrate to Azure-DevOps with Trunk-based branching.
The current git-flow CI set-up works as follows:
Merge feature with Dev
Jenkins triggers on Dev and builds a package with Maven
Jenkins deploys the package to D
Test your API on the D, if its good manually trigger Jenkins release pipeline
Jenkins will merge dev with master
Maven creates a release; creating a package (e.g. v0.1) and prepare the next development iteration (v0.2-SNAPSHOT) in master
Jenkins Deploys the package on A and P
Merge master back into Dev
So we have 2 separate pipelines here: dev and release. I'm hoping trunk-based development makes this process simpler by reducing it to one pipeline that is triggered by merges into master. But I don't know how to handle the versioning with Maven here.
This is what I have in mind for the Trunk-based (feature/master) pipeline:
Merge feature with Master
Azure pipelines triggers Maven release
(!) Maven takes the 0.1-SNAPSHOT version and creates a 0.1 release version and puts it..where? in a release branch?
Maven then creates the next working version 0.2-SNAPSHOT on the master branch
(!) this would trigger Azure pipelines again, creating a loop
Anyone have experience with Trunk Based development with Maven solve this? I would actually prefer to do it without a release branch because the released packages are already providing the release-branch functionality.
At first glance this answer seemingly solves my issue, but it just ignores the issue by going around it and just using a hash.
I'm trying to setup a pipeline for running all kinds of tests against pull requests into my repository. Repository is git repo hosted with Bitbucket Server and TeamCity is Enterprise 2019.1.5 (build 66605). There are a few key aspects to the task:
There's a lot of tests. One way or the other tests should run in parallel to achieve reasonable execution time. The tests are already partitioned as separate TeamCity build configurations, each having good enough execution time.
There's much less build agents available for the task, so it's not impossible for a particular build to spend quite some time (up to 1-2 hours) in a build queue.
The result of the testing should be reported to Bitbucket as a single aggregate value. I.e. if there are, say, 3 individual builds from p.1 with two passing and one failing then Bitbucket should receive single "failed" build status.
Ideally, pipeline should be triggered by a feature branch change (refs/pull-requests/123/from in Bitbucket lingo), but checkout merges of the feature branch into target branch (refs/pull-requests/123/merge in Bitbucket lingo).
Given above requirements, I experimented with Composite Build Configuration (https://www.jetbrains.com/help/teamcity/composite-build-configuration.html) as it seemed perfect fit for the job. So I set up single composite build with proper builds from p.1 as snapshot dependencies, "Pull Requests" and "Commit status publisher" build features. It works perfectly, except for one thing...
The only thing I cannot seem to be able to work around is the fact that VCS roots in the dependencies collect changes when the build chain is added to the build queue. This means that because of p.2 (non-negligible max time spent in build queue) some builds end up running against a little bit dated sources. Ideally, I would like to be able to run the builds against the latest sources.
So my question is if there's any way to disable revision synchronization for dependencies? Or maybe I could approach the whole problem in some completely different way without using snapshot dependencies?
Cross-posted at community forum: https://teamcity-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360006745840
I'm looking for advice on the best approach to setup TeamCity/Octopus.
Currently I have multiple branches in TFS2015 - dev, main and release (currently we create a release branch for each release).
Our procedure is to develop in dev and deploy to dev environment. When we are ready for testing we merge from dev to main and deploy to test from main. When happy we create a release branch and deploy to live from the release branch. This is a manual process.
Hotfixes are done on the release branch and deployed to live. We then merge back to main/dev.
I'm totally new to this and so far in a VM playground I've setup TFS2015, TeamCity and Octopus and can check-in to TFS, build/create package on TeamCity and deploy this pack from Octopus. But...
I'm unsure how I should setup TeamCity and Octopus to work with multiple branches? Multiple projects for each branch and generate different artifacts?
When I do this for real I have a TFS VM, I plan on installing TeamCity and Octopus on this along with the build agent. Is this a bad idea? Should I create a new VM just for TM and Octopus?
Any advice or best practice would be appreciated.
Although your question is good in scope, but a good answer must cover many details to be complete.
Let me try to point out the main areas that you will need to further investigate and configure.
TeamCity
A VCS root can be configured to listen to multiple branches via a branch specification
A VCS root can contain multiple projects/solutions and these can be built in multiple steps within TeamCity.
Given that Team City does not support conditional build steps, you will need a different strategy to allow you to vary build steps (and parameters) per release channels / environments.
My recommend approach is to split up the builds into a build definition per release channel (target environment).
Dev and Feature branches could share a single build definition.
Master and Hotfix branches can share a single build definition since they both publish to staging/production environments.
Release branches will need a separate build definition and publish to QA/Testing environment.
This gives you fine grained control over parameter and configurations of each release channel. build a debug version of your app from Dev branch for example at major version 3, while build a release version from Master branch with major version 2.
Every build definition will have a step to publish its artefacts/packages to Octopus Deploy, and specify the channel of which the artifacts belong to.
Octopus Deploy
In Octopus Deploy, define the channels to reflect the release channels, that also reflect your branching model.
Develop, Test, Release are my standard goto channels
Each channel can enforce a different Lifecycle to limit the environments that a channel can deploy to and how an application progresses through your overall ALM cycle.
I know this is not a complete answer. but it is a good start that I hope can help you refine your question to more specific technical details.
We're having somewhat similar CI setup requirements except TFS. In our case workflow for most projects is: GitHub -> TeamCity -> Octopus Deploy.
So I'm not sure about multi-branch setup with TFS, but in case with GitHub repos it's pretty easy to configure in TeamCity. You just have to specify branch-related settings in your VCS root (see Branch configuration). When you have configured that, TeamCity will let you run build's for every specified branch separately and will display build statuses for every branch nicely.
In Octopus we use Channels feature to split workflows of releases coming from different branches. That means we have channel-per-branch convention for the projects, so that TeamCity is pushing packaged releases from particular branch (in our case it's develop and master) into it's respective channel in Octopus (see Channels in Octopus).
Probably you can setup all the services on single machine but imho it's not the best practice to do performance-wise and scalability-wise.
Off course I don't know you code etc but I think you should step away from merging from dev to test and then creating a version from test. That way you essentially are building a different application compared to the one you were having on dev. Once you merge from test to production and build your application from there, you are releasing a build you haven't been testing.
You should strive for a flow in which you build once and deploy multiple times. So, build one package which you promote from dev to test to production.
Off course you can have a production branch on which you could fix bugs etc. The Channels feature in Octopus works great for scenario's like that.
So answering my own question (sorry), the approach I ended up taking was to simplify my branches and configure TeamCity/Octopus like so...
Branching Strategy
I've moved from
--dev
--main
--release
----release1
----release2
to
--master
--release
----release1
----release2
Master is where most of the devs do their work, when we are ready for a release we have a cut-off point and merge master into a new release branch.
The release branch is deployed to test and any fixes from testing are made on the release branch.
When testing is complete we deploy to live/production from this branch.
This means that the binaries we have tested are exactly the same as the ones we deploy to live/production.
Teamcity
In TeamCity master is automatically built each time a check-in occurs. Then the package is pushed to Octopus. Octopus acts as a repository in this case. TeamCity also creates the release on Octopus. So it should be checkin->build->create release->deploy.
To do this, I have one VCS Root and have a build configuration called Build-Master. This uses the checkout rules to ensure I'm only using the master branch. I use the Ocotpus packaging to build the package then use the OctopusDeploy runner in TeamCity to create a release automatically and deploy to the dev servers.
Release is different. I want to deploy to the test servers manually rather than each time a check-in occurs. When happy promote this to the live production servers.
Any fixes from test will be made to the release branch and deployed to test.
When testing is complete we promote to live and any hotfixes are made on the release branch. Obviously all fixes/hotfixes are merged down to master.
So, in TeamCity to achieve this I have a build configuration called Build-Release. Again, I use the checkout rules to ensure I'm dealing with the correct release branch.
The build creates a package using OctoPack, however this time it's not pushed to Octopus.
Octopus
Octopus has a project specifically for deploying master to our dev servers, for example projectnamehere-dev.
In Octopus, I have a separate project for Test/Prod. I've setup an external feed which points at TeamCity so I can pickup the package created in TeamCity. This is setup in Library->External Feeds.
So, to deploy to test. I create the release branch in TFS and give it a version number, 1,2,3 etc. I then change the Build-Release build config to point at this new branch. Change the version number.
Then in Octopus, I create a release, select this package and deploy to test. Any fixes from testing are made on this release branch. I just build the package again and create a new release and choose the new package.
When testing is complete, in Octopus I just promote the last release to the live production servers.
Channels in Octopus are used on the two projects because they have different life cycles. I also created two new life cycles, the default is dev/test/prod. I created just a dev and then test/prod.
Hope this helps.
In the version control settings -> vcs -> Branch Specifications: "*" ("This will do all branch, filter as needs be" e.g. +:refs/heads/master +:refs/heads/develop)
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Octopus doesn't handle branches, it only deploys, you can however use their rest api, so for example, if test pass in develop then call the octopus rest api to create a new release and deploy.
We are using Perforce and Maven and we are in a situation where we have one branch A that hosts a mature project and another branch B, that we are starting to dev on that uses the code hosted in the first branch.
I anticipate that going forward, there could be cases where a check-in into Branch A will result in failed compilation in Branch B because the developers working on them are not aware of specific usages and cross-dependencies. And then devs will waste time updating B code and figure that its not compiling.
Branch/project A needs to remain as its own separate entity because it's code could be used in another future project.
Can someone advice me around handling and alleviating such problem? Any best-practices that you guys can suggest? Much appreciated.
You need to set up a build environment:
1) Set up a continuous integration (CI) server, such as Jenkins. When a developer commits to Branch A, it should detect the commit and trigger a build.
2) When Branch A completes its build, it deploys its artifacts to a shared repository. Highly recommended (buy not strictly necessary) is that the build for Branch A deploys to a Repository Server, such as Nexus (but a repository in source control or a FTP server does the job too).
3) Set up Branch B in your CI server, but with a build "trigger" that runs whenever a build for Branch A succeeds.
4) Configure both build configurations to email relevant team members (or everybody?) whenever a build fails.
Also, both branches should depend on your repository from #2 above. If you need the entire environment to be repeatable and self-contained, go the repository-in-scm route.