First, the prior situation: We have this project with a one-click build script. It's cobbled together with TFS Deployer + PowerShell + VB Script. TFS Deployer sits on the production machine, copies the new website files into a brand new directory, and then calls a VB Script that changes the IIS website to the new directory.
Now, I'm moving the team away from the horror that is TFS/MSBuild. I have a TeamCity build agent on a dedicated build server. A simple NANT script deploys the build artifacts from the build server to the production server through a shared folder. Simple, quick, and effective.
However, I haven't found either a way a) to run the VB Script remotely b) update the IIS site remotely with a different mechanisms (programmatically within the 1-click build). Windows Server 2003/IIS6. Any ideas?
Update: I solved this by creating another vbs that remotely called the old vbs I had through WMI. Thanks everyone!
If I were to head in any direction, I would consider setting up a WMI script to do the work and then configuring it on the server in question. I would have to think about how to easily include this into your automated build. I personaally have not worked with TeamCity yet, although I have attended sessions on how it works.
WMI might be able to run the script, as well, and act as a sort of service front end, so you may be able to reuse what you have already spent effort on.
Could you change the vbscript file into an ASP file in a different website on the same server? This would allow you to call it remotely.
We've used NAntContrib's mkiisdir task to create/modify a virtual directory on remote machines.
<mkiisdir iisserver="Staging" dirpath="c:\temp" vdirname="Temp" />
This should either create (if the vdir doesn't exist) or change the location (if the vdir already exists).
Generally, it seems the cleanest way to do this is to first delete the vdir with the deliisdir task, followed by a create.
<deliisdir vdirname="Temp" failonerror="false" />
<mkiisdir dirpath="c:\temp" vdirname="Temp" accessread="true" accesswrite="false" accessscript="true" enabledirbrowsing="false" authntlm="true" authbasic="false" authanonymous="false" appcreate="Pooled" />
Happy coding!
Related
I'm trying to figure out a way to automate the deployment to our QA environment. The problem is that our release is quite big, so needs to be Zipped, FTP'd and then Unzipped on the QA server. I'm not sure how best to unzip remotely.
I can think of a few options, but none of them sound right:
Use PsExec to execute a remote commandline call on the QA server to unzip the release.
Host a web service on the QA server that unzips the release and copies it to the right place. This service can be called by our release when it's done uploading the files.
Host a windows service on the QA server that monitors a file location and does the unzipping.
None of these are pretty though. I wonder how others have solved this problem?
PS: we use CruiseControl.NET to execute a NAnt script that does the building, zipping and FTP.
Instead of compressing and un-compressing, you can use a tool like rsync; which can transparently compress data during file transfer. The -z option tells rsync to use compression.
But I assume you are in a Windows environment, in which case you could use cwRsync (which is "rsync for Windows").
Depending on your access to the QA box this might not be a viable solution. You'll need to:
install the cwRsync server on the remote machine and
allow the traffic through any firewalls.
At the last place I worked at, we had a guy write a Windows service on the CI box to do the unzipping. TFS Team Server finished the build and notified a service to zip the completed build and copy it to the CI box. The CI box picked up on the new file, and unzipped it. It may have been a bit heavy, but it worked well - and he was cognizant to log all actions to the event log, so it was easy to diagnose if a server had been reset and the service hadn't started.
Update: One thing that we would have liked to improve on that process was to have the service on the CI box check for zip files and uncompressed files that were older than x months, for purging purposes. We routinely ran out of disk space (it was a VM that we rarely looked at), and had to manually purge old builds when it happened.
Is it possible to write a script that executes certain instructions, and is triggered by any check-in to a CVS repository?
The script would scan the list of files in the change-set and do a copy operation on certain files in a certain sub-directory.
I would hopefully be able to execute various console applications, including ones written in .NET.
Problem is, I need this done quickly and I don't have access to the CVS server, due to corporate IT red-tape, etc.
Is there a way to set this up on one of the client workstations instead?
Can it be done without interfering with my working folder?
Can you get commit notifications by email as this blog shows? If so, you could be able to use maildrop (or good old procmail, etc) to run arbitrary commands and scripts on your workstation when the commit notification mails arrive.
I found a .NET library that seems up to the task - SharpCVSLib.
http://csharpopensource.com/sharpcvslib.aspx
(Hopefully it will work on a developer workstation and not need to be hosted on the CVS server.)
I am researching one-click deployment with Visual Studio 2010, the current deployment process involves zipping up the contents of the IIS folder and taking a backup of the current database before completing the remaining manual deployment steps. This allows us to roll back a deployment, I need to retain the essence of this process if not the specifics.
Is there a way of automating this with MSDeploy?
You can have MSDeploy execute a batch file that backs up the IIS directory (see example)
You can also write some SQL, put it in a .sql file, execute the SQL script in the batch file as well. See this example to at least get a start. It is for SQL server, but if you are not using that then hopefully the database you are using has something similar.
Finally I found the answer, thank you to kniemczak for posting the information about how to backup IIS and SQL Server from the command line.
Automating ASP.NET MVC deployments using Web Deploy
Web Deploy runCommand Provider
It seems the following:
msdeploy.exe
-verb:sync -source:runCommand='C:\Scripts\Backup.cmd'
-dest:auto,computername=192.168.0.1
Should cover my needs.
Is there a way to automatically publish a website to multiple locations at once?
Our website is load balanced across multiple servers, so when I want to publish I have to do it to each server individually.
Thx,
Trev
Perhaps with some build scripts, such as MSBuild? Or perhaps you could create a script (PowerShell, VBScript, whatever), which copies all contents of a directory, and invoke it in the post build event (configurable in Visual Studio), so that once your solution (or the last project, actually) is built the script will run and copy the output files to wherever you need them.
You could
Publish the content to a UNC and have all of the web servers work off of that UNC
Push the content from your staging/QA server to production using a tool like MSDeploy
Use FRS to replicate the files from a "master" webserver to everyone else.
MSDeploy is setup to handle this using multiple Configurations for each location. Scott Hanselman presented on this at Mix '10
http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/FT14
or just use multiple publish commands. one for each location.
At work, we have a windows server 2003 with IIS and Subversion installed. We use it to publish and test locally
our ASP.NET websites. Every programmer has Tortoise installed on his PC and can update/commit content to the server. Hosting the repositories is working fine.
But the files kept in those repositories needs then to be copied to our local IIS (virtual directories).
What is an easy way to publish those subversion repositories to our local IIS?
Edit:
Thanks to puetzk I added a simple bat file that gets executed every time a commit occurs (check the subversion documentation about hooks). My bat file only contains:
echo off
setlocal
:: Localize the working copy where IIS points)
pushd E:\wwwroot\yourapp\trunk
:: Update your working copy
svn update
endlocal
exit
Just keep the web server's file area as a working copy, and perform an svn up in it whenever you want to "publish". Configure it to hide the contents of the .svn folders if they seem untidy to you (I don't specifically know how to do this, but I assume it can be done). They will already have the filesystem hidden bit, which may take care of this.
If you want it really automatic (updates as soon as someone commits), use a post-commit hook script on the SVN server to kick off the first process.
Others in the comments have suggested using export instead of checkout. That can work too, and avoids the .svn clutter, but has two drawbacks. One, it has to redownload the entire contents every time, not just the modified files (since it didn't keep the .svn dir to remember what it has). If you have a lot of files, this will be much slower. Two, update replaces the file atomically (writes the new version in .svn/tmp, then moves it into place). Export writes the file gradually into it's destination as it downloads. That means export could deliver an incomplete file to someone who browsed it at just the wrong time.
SVN doesn't support IIS; you can however run the standalone svnserve server as a windows service.
There's the SVN FAQ entry about it, and this blog post on Vertigo Software blog may be helpful too.
UPDATE:
After your clarification, I see that what you are looking for is a way to automatically update the code on the server after it's checked in. Look into CruiseControl.NET, after looking at the subversion integration tutorial it looks like it should do what you want.
UPDATE 2: This tutorial describes integrating Subversion, CruiseControl.NET and Nant.
maybe SVNIsapi can solve the problem (http://www.svnisapi.com). Cause it only utilizes an IIS installation, therefore you don't need an APACHE server or an SVNSERVER service. Secondly it should be possible to stack the ASP.NET ISAPI plugin onto the processing of SVNISAPI, so that a ASP.NET (.aspx) page will interpreted after read from the repository.
Cheers
Paolo
Use can use the free Visual-SVN Server to quickly install Subversion with Apache front end. It also have a nice MMC snap-in for managing the server and repositories.
You will than be able to access subversion with HTTP or HTTPS, but the port number must be different from the one your local IIS uses (default port for Visual-SVN server is 8080).
If you really need to access the repositories using your local IIS port 80, you can try SVN-IIS which acts as a bridge between your IIS and Apache. I haven't tried this one myself though.