If there is a code base and many servers, how should I deploy the executable in multiple servers regularly? I need a script to do this
There are many system management tools. Chef is what we use, it is great but there is a bit of a learning curve. You may want to look into your OS's default package manager and distribute packages of your code base.
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So I've been agonizing over embracing a deployment/configuration management tool like Chef or Puppet for a good long while. Not because I have any hesitation about them in general, but because I don't think they are a good fit for our specific scenario.
As far as I can see, these types of tools are targeted at frequent/wide-scale deployments, where you need to roll out software to 10s-1000s of systems. In our environment, we have a collection of ~25 different web services spread across half a dozen runtimes, with 1-8 deployments of each in production currently. Our big deployment problem is that each of the services has a different deployment story, and it's entirely manual, so it tends to be time consuming and error prone. Another wrinkle is that different instances in production may be different versions of the software, so we may need to concurrently support multiple deployment stories for a single service.
So I feel like we need something more like Ant/Maven/Rake, which is customized for each service. However, my experience with those is they are generally focused on local operations, and specific to a given language/runtime.
Is there a runtime-agnostic framework for describing and orchestrating building/testing/deployment in the manner I'm interested in?
I'm sure if I hit them long enough, I could get Rake or Puppet to do these for me, but I'm looking for something built for this purpose.
(Oh, and to make things worse, everything runs on Windows)
Thanks!
Here's another alternative you might want to consider: kwatee (I'm affiliated) is a free lightweight deploiement tool which besides having a web management interface can also integrate with ant (or maven or anything else with python CLI) to automate build & deploiement on dev/test environments for instance.
One of the nice things is the web configuration interface which make it pretty easy to quickly configure your deploiment stories, i.e. which software/version goes on which server. It's often necessary to setup different parameters in configuration files depending on the target server. For that you can "templatize" your packages using kwatee variable (similar to environment variables) which are configured with different values for each server.
Software must be registered in Kwatee's repository in the form of a folder of files, or an archive (zip, tar, tar.gz, bzip2, war) or a single file (e.g. an exe). Msi's are not supported. To deploy on windows kwatee needs the servers to have either telnet/ftp or ssh/scp (there are free tools out there).
My development machine is different from my deployment/production servers in some ways that cannot be changed. (For example, my development machine has multiple versions of database servers running on different ports, while each production server has only a single version of the RDBMS running, each instance running on the default port.)
What techniques are available for configuring a Sinatra web application differently on one machine versus another? Ideally, answers would summarize multiple approaches, and highlight the one approach that has worked best for the respondent. Any file-based solutions should also (ideally) discuss how to handle this situation in the presence of a unified source control repository between both machines.
Note that this question/problem is orthogonal to configuring for development mode versus production mode.
One solution would be to load two configuration files: first, the main one (let's say, settings.rb), then a machine-specific one that would override necessary settings (settings-custom.rb).
Of course, since you have multiple machines, you have multiple configuration sets. In order to manage them easily, they could be named settings-$hostname.rb. Then you could simply symlink the appropriate file to settings-custom.rb. For example, on unix:
ln -s settings-`hostname`.rb settings-custom.rb
If you use source control, you can track all the configuration sets, and ignore settings-custom.rb (because it's only a symlink, and doesn't need to be tracked) -- with this method, you won't need to change any code between the machines.
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Are there any tools for windows like that *nix world has? I am looking for something like Chef or Puppet.
I have found cfEngine but it still looks very *nix centric. Ideally it would be open source, and command line driven.
The idea is to put together an automated infrastructure with windows based servers. Our current IT department does not allow non-windows servers.
Chef is supported on Windows by Opscode. While we don't run Windows for any of our infrastructure, we do have developers who are continually improving our Windows support. We also get community contributions, and most of the early phase Windows functionality for Chef was contributed by the community.
Important: Opscode now provides an MSI installer for Chef on Windows. This makes it easier than ever to get Chef and Ruby installed on Windows.
While we have a lot of Unix/Linux background across our teams, our intention is that Windows is treated as a first class citizen. 2012 will be a big year for Chef and Windows. Keep an eye on the Opscode blog for announcements.
The following Chef Resources work on Windows:
Environment Resource: sets windows environment variables
User
Group
Mount
File
Gem Package
Remote File
Cookbook File
Template
Service
Ruby Block
Execute
That is, these are resources included in Chef itself. As Chef is extensible with cookbooks, many more resources are added through a variety of Windows specific cookbooks. Read on for more information.
You can get started with using Chef and Windows here:
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Fast+Start+Guide+for+Windows
Originally, Doug MacEchern wrote some cookbooks to do a number of things to automate windows, too.
https://github.com/dougm/site-cookbooks/tree/master/windows
This information and more available on the Chef Wiki:
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+Windows
Update
The following cookbook adds new resources to Chef to manage Windows:
http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/windows
It is an update/rewrite of Doug's fine resources from his repository linked above. Documentation is available on the Chef Wiki.
The following cookbook deploys PowerShell and provides a resource to run PowerShell commands/scripts directly in Chef Recipes:
http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/powershell
Documentation is available in the README.md included in the cookbook tarball.
Additional cookbooks for installing 7-zip, managing IIS and SQL Server have been added. Our "database" cookbook has been extended with a resource/provider for managing SQL Server databases and users (with the tds rubygem).
The knife-windows plugin for knife adds functionality for interacting with Windows systems to provision them with Chef installation.
Update: We have now added File ACL support for Windows to Chef, for all the usual file/directory suspects.
Cfengine Nova has had stable native support for Windows for years (i.e. no Cygwin is needed).
Everything that is possible on Unix (e.g. run commands, file copy, file edit, etc.) can also be done on Windows, with addition to Windows-specific features like
Registry management
File ACL permissions
Windows service management
Event log support
Advanced OS discovery (version, arch, service pack, network, domain, etc.)
For a short introduction, look in Section 11 of the Nova supplement manual: http://cfengine.com/files/Nova_Supplement.pdf
I have been looking for exactly the same thing.
I ran across Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration which purports to do many of the CM tasks you'd want to do with Chef/Puppet.
I am not going to give any opinion on it because I am still early in evaluating it - but if you're still looking for something, give this a shot.
Having had a deal of experience here i think that it really depends what you need to manage on a given box. Find your most common use case and ask a more specific question in terms of: whats the best tool for managing that. Things like IIS can be tricky (on older windows builds at least) and finding modules for CM tools to manage things like IIS settings and app pools can be hit and miss - especially when it comes to advanced settings (worker thready recycling springs to mind)
However Puppet has forge modules for more basic IIS settings which largely worked for me - and i really like the declarative format here - especially if you are managing large numbers of IIS servers
Also one of the major issues with Windows and configuration management is the lack of a proper package management solution - what actually comes in really handy here is something called Chocolatey (see http://chocolatey.org/) there is a plugin to use this as a provider in puppet - making the whole management process particularly easy. However i imagine that this can be integrated with other CM tools aswell - but does a great deal to help with installing software automatically in a windows environment
Though it is worth stating that whatever you end up using you will have to spend a while figuring out some odd bugs - windows and scripting/automation is not the best.
Based on my experience, I am glad to use such toolset:
Use powershell to manage the windows configuration. If only windows server, you can remotely execute the ps script.
If you like, suggest to use Puppet or Chef to distribute your powershell script into client.
If you like, suggest to use cygwin + (windows sshd) + crond to manage the shell-likely scripts which run in windows.
I think its better if you can use Microsoft System Center.
It a solution from the Microsoft to manage Microsoft base products form desktops to servers and all. Should give a try ...
How to Deploy Applications in Configuration Manager
Deploying Software and Operating Systems in System Center 2012
I don't recommend Chef unless you are a software developer who knows ruby. Chef is designed for software developers who want to manage IT infrastructure. Not for SysOps people who are the ones that actually end up managing it. It tries to treat IT infrastructure like code which is counter intuitive to how it actually works which is more like just data.
Puppet is more friendly for SysOps people imho but still can be complicated.
The good news is that there are other options as well. Less so for windows but projects like Puppet do support it reasonably well.
I am experimenting with different open source projects just to see which one I can work with since I am a beginner. Of course, many projects have different dependencies and programs that you must install. I want to keep things organized and I don't want to pollute my main windows account, since I use this machine for everyday computing also.
Will creating a seperate windows account on my computer help separate the dependencies for the projects? Are there any better alternatives (other than using virtual machines)?
Thanks
Although you mentioned other than them, but virtual machines are actually the best option if you're planning on working with a lot of different projects and you don't want to pollute your environment too much. If you build them right, you can have a baseline VM that is simple to revert back to if you want to start from scratch because the environment got too polluted.
The problem with only using a separate account is that many installable tools and libraries means they're still going to be made available for all users on the machine, so it doesn't keep things cleaned up. For example, if Visual Studio tools typically apply to all users on the machine. COM dependencies aren't user specific. Some things install Windows Services that need to be running most of the time, but you don't use unless you're developing for them (like SQL Server Reporting Services).
How about installing many kinds of operation system?
If you have enough money, you can buy a computer only for experiment
Virtual machines is definitely the way to go - most non-trivial software modifies more than HKEY_CURRENT_USER machine state. If you don't want full-blown virtual machines (but oh, they're sweet, especially the ones supporting state snapshots!) you could look at something like sandboxie.
Is a CI server required for continous integration?
In order to facilitate continous integration you need to automate the build, distribution, and deploy processes. Each of these steps is possible without any specialized CI-Server. Coordinating these activities can be done through file notifications and other low level mechanisms; however, a database driven backend (a CI-Server) coordinating these steps greatly enhances the reliability, scalability, and maintainability of your systems.
You don't need a dedicated server, but a build machine of some kind is invaluable, otherwise there is no single central place where the code is always being built and tested. Although you can mimic this affect using a developer machine, there's the risk of overlap with the code that is being changed on that machine.
BTW I use Hudson, which is pretty light weight - doesn't need much to get it going.
It's important to use a dedicated machine so that you get independent verification, without corruption.
For small projects, it can be a pretty basic machine, so don't let hardware costs get you down. You probably have an old machine in a closet that is good enough.
You can also avoid dedicated hardware by using a virtual machine. Best bet is to find a server that is doing something else but is underloaded, and put the VM on it.
Before I ever heard the term "continuous-integration" (This was back in 2002 or 2003) I wrote a nightly build script that connected to cvs, grabbed a clean copy of the main project and the five smaller sub-projects, built all the jars via ant then built and redeployed a WAR file via a second ant script that used the tomcat ant tasks.
It ran via cron at 7pm and sent email with a bunch of attached output files. We used it for the entire 7 months of the project and it stayed in use for the next 20 months of maintenance and improvements.
It worked fine but I would prefer hudson over bash scripts, cron and ant.
A separate machine is really necessary if you have more than one developer on the project.
If you're using the .NET technology stack here's some pointers:
CruiseControl.Net is fairly lightweight. That's what we use. You could probably run it on your development machine without too much trouble.
You don't need to install or run Visual Studio unless you have Visual Studio Setup Projects. Instead, you can use a free command line build tool called MSBuild.