I have the following setup:
Main Website - MVC 3 project, to be hosted on www.domain.com
Intranet Web App - MVC 3 project, windows authentication, hosted on admin.domain.com, which is only accessible from within the local subnet.
CDN Website - A simple web app that merely serves images to both of the above. It will be hosted (publically) on cdn.domain.com, when we go live. I have set up a local project to mock the CDN during development.
I've written a business layer that allows users in the admin panel to upload images, which are then physically saved to the CDN path that's configured (currently on the local machine i.e. C:\Code\SolutionName\CDNProject\images). The main website then uses the same business layer to find and distribute the images via http://cdn.domain.com/images/. http://cdn.domain.com is currently set to http://localhost:55555, while we develop.
Whenever an image is created via the admin panel, it is physically created on disk. Each developer works on his own machine, we we want to be able to check these files in to TFS, for the time being. As you might have guessed, adding files to the file system does not automatically reference them in the project:
I thought there may be some way to reference these images as resources, or set a directory to a "content" directory of sorts... but I can't find anything.
Some developers work remotely via VPN, and do not have access to the local network (only TFS), so a network path is not an acceptable solution.
I thought I might be able to set a pre-build event up, to add all files in a directory to the project?
There is no very easy way to do that. There are a few ways to think about:
1) Write VS adding which adds new files to project (via DTE - starting point). Find out how to automatically run this VS addin on Pre-Build step. Install this addin to your developers machines.
2) Extend your admin logic to automatically check-in the uploaded files to TFS via TFS API
3) try to apply more sofisticated techonologies like this one: T4 Tutorial: Integrating Generated Files in Visual Studio Projects
Hope that helps,
Visual Studio project files have an XML syntax. Project file properties can be modified in a simple text editor (files added/removed, etc.).
You can create a script to open your solution, and before actually opening the solution, you can scan that directory and "inject" the files (with the appropriate XML tags) in the project files.
I don't think you can add this as a pre-build event because the project files are already loaded at that point, and you cannot modify them while they're used.
Related
Trying to start from Timber but the solution won't load without a site on IIS Express existing. Further the contents of the downloaded zip file, while working, the solution does not come with a way to deploy to a new zip so I can create a new zip and deploy. There seem to be files in the zip that are not in the solution so I'm concerned I might not end up with same result just zipping up the files in the solution.
Trying to download the Skeleton but no links to actually download from the app store?
https://virtocommerce.com/skeleton-theme
Starting from the VirtoCommerce.Storefront project.
Copy the contents of the App_Data/Themes/Default folder to a "theme" directory in a new directory.
Create a git repo from the root that contains the "theme" folder.
Add a GitVersion.yml file to control the versioning.
Running in Azure using blob storage you can create a CI process to automatically upload your theme when changes are checked in.
Lastly login to the platform, navigate to the site you uploaded to and activate the new theme. This allows you to fall back if needed.
Zip File
You could also zip the contents of your repo up as well.
The zip file should have a folder in it like "ThemeName-0.0.0", within that folder should be the assets, config, layout, locales, snippets, social and templates folders.
Upload that in the store of your choice and activate.
I'll suggest to use default storefont theme as base theme for customization and educations.
I'm providing some helpful information for helping you to better understand some technical moments related to working with the VC themes:
How theme resources resolving process works:
How to develop custom theme and what technology stack for this use:
Local running pre-compiled platform with installed modules
Local storefront fork (pre-compiled or from source code if you need to future customization)
For case with single theme you might directly change default (global) theme which contains in storefront project App_Data/Themes/default or make separated GitHub repository which will contain only theme and static pages files (as we made for our main site virtocommerce.com theme) and link folder with theme to storefront App_Data/Themes/{store name}/Themes.
Edit theme files in Visual studio code or any other preferred IDE, all changes will be immediately reflected to the local storefront, thanks to the cache invalidation based on theme folder file changes watcher.
Deploy theme changes to staging or productions environment by using any of
convenient CI processes. We are use Jenkins server and Azure Deployment.
Change theme files from manager UI not recommended because you will lose history of changes. And you should use this way only for emergency fixes or for debugging purposes.
I did the following steps:
I have created a new Umbraco instance by using the nuget package and visual studio.
I have deployed to Azure, using Azure DB as backend.
Installed the articulate package.
Added my project to version control (including App_Plugins folder, articulate dlls and so on).
I am able delete the umbraco installation and I can restore it completely from version control including Articulate.
Now I am starting to add content, articles, pictures and so on.
Think I do not need to backup the whole folder on the web server. I am doing regular backups of my Azure DB and I need some folders which are also filled with new content, like
media (filling with pictures which I am adding to my articles)
App_Plugins (keeping installed packages in umbraco)
App_Data/packages (file directory for installed packages)
App_Data/umbraco.config (keeping some content for Articulate)
So, is this everything I need to be able to restore the whole system by using the version control part, azure db backup and the listed folders?
Ideally for data/contents you should backup media and App_Data folders. However, if you want to backup Umbraco site (including cache files) then I would recommend App_Plugins, App_Data, Bin, Config, Umbraco & Umbraco_Client folders.
Hope this information helps!
Basically I follow the approach as described in the question. I have added the following files and folders to the Visual Studio project and then later to version control (I have just expanded the more interesting folders which are not part of the project file by default, but needed when you redeploy the solution from scratch):
As described the backend is hosted on Azure SQL.
Open Live Writer makes it very easy to host article content on another ftp server.
By following this approach it is very easy to redeploy the complete solution, e.g. for umbraco upgrades or major changes on the site.
The kpm pack command needs the runtime for the server - is it possible to install windows runtimes on osx just for the pack and deploy?
Ok, it seems that in order to recognise that the deployment is an aspnet vNext project and to handle that as a 'ProjectK Web Application deployment', you have to make it look like it all came from Visual Studio (or at least that was the only way I managed to get it to work right now)...
I did this by taking an example one from somewhere else...
I took a simple single vnext web project .sln file and changed the project name and project GUID.
I took the .kproj Visual Studio project file and did the same.
There isn't much that needs to be changed - only the name of the project and GUID. It's nice that there isn't any file lists in there so I feel that this might end up as a once-only activity...
I did find that there are some project structure rules that seemed to make it break. You seem to have to have the sln file in the top level folder and a folder underneath for the web project. If there is ONLY a web project then this might seem overkill, but I tried collapsing everything up to the top with the sln file correctly pointing, but that didn't work.
The other thing that you need to make sure you have is a reference to "Microsoft.AspNet.Server.IIS" in the project.json dependencies. Without this, the AspNet.Loader.dll and bin folder don't get deployed.
Apart from that, I am now able to use Sublime Text (or whatever I want on osx), test using "k kestrel", checkin through git and it gets deployed automatically to an azure web site! yippee!
Actually this makes much more sense because it is letting the target decide upon the binaries it needs to satisfy the deployments. Next challenge might be to get it to pull 'my' libraries from a custom NuGet source to get my binary libraries in there and avoid uploading ALL of the source to the website!
Oh - and another tip: Quit kestrel with 'Enter' for a clean quit instead of Z which leaves the port listening but non-functional!
I'm using Publish/Web Deploy to deploy an asp.net aplication from Visual studio 2010. It works perfect, but there is a problem. If the new release is not working as expected, the old version is already replaced by the new one and there is no easy way to roll back to the working version. How is this best solved? I wish it was possible to keep the old version on the server so I could just switch back if needed.
With WebDeploy there is no built in rollback feature, so once you've deployed that's it.
There's a number of hand rolled strategies you could put in place, for example:
Limited Access e.g. Shared Hosting:
Where you don't have full access to the machine -
Backup the live site beforehand by downloading it.
Keep copies of what you deployed so you can push the previous version should something break
Full Access:
Maintain two sets of folders for the application and map your site to one or other of these folders. When you come to deploy switch the IIS site's physical path to the other folder then deploy. If the site fails then just knock the site back to the original folder. Each successful deploy would alternate between these two folders.
For stuff like user uploaded content you'd need to map virtual directories to a place on the file system that's always the same place because you don't want to be copying these around each time.
You're not the only one who has encountered these issues. Have a look at this article by Rob Conery and his observations about the state of affairs regarding ASP.NET deployment.
ASP.NET Deployment Needs To Be Fixed
Getting Constructive On ASP.NET Deployment
Using some form of Source Control would be another alternative. We use subversion, so if the publish goes bad, we can just update back to the last-good revision, and publish that. Even if you're the only developer, using source control can be very useful.
I am using Visual Studio 2010 and IIS 7.0 .Currently when I want to deploy an website to my web server I follow these steps -
1.Right-click on website and say publish..to get the entire site copied to a local folder.
2.Next using filezilla just ftp the copied files to the web server.
The problem is I have to deploy entire website all the time since I can't keep a track of the changes. Although I do find my way easier and without problems. I dont want to a whole lot of configuration and deployment packages unless it is really worth it and also relatively easy to do. Is there a better way I should do the deployment ? Any suggestions are welcome !
You could use the Web Deployment tool. It needs to be installed on the webserver too and can even take care of publishing a sql server database.
http://www.iis.net/download/WebDeploy
Do NOT use the Web Platform installer to install this package.
You can just right click on website and Publish Web Site; the Publish Website Wizard opens. You can click the ... button to browse on the Target Location textbox and choose FTP over in the left hand side, then put in your FTP credentials.
You can tick 'Allow this precompiled site to be updateable' so if you need to make minor changes (such as scripts, css, or html) but I don't know how reliable that is.
Good luck!
Scott Gu just published an article about the Deploy Features in VS today:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/29/vs-2010-web-deployment.aspx
Personally I use Dispatch for ASP.NET. Works well for me. It only uploads the files that have changed and can check for files that are missing locally or on the server.
http://dispatchasp.net/
If you are using the Publish Wizard then you have no choice but to deploy the whole site. There is no way for the wizard to look at the files on the server and know definitively if the file has changed or not (it could look at file size or something, but that's not 100% guarantee of no change and FTP doesn't offer an easy way to do a checksum algorithm).
Other then that, do it the way you would do it on any other language/tool. Just manually FTP the files you've changed. Of course, this means you have know which files are side-affected by your changes. And if you're not confident as to what files you've side affected.... publish wizard is your friend :)