I am planning to create build definitions for one of our projects for CI automated builds. We have 2 environments - QA and Live and the same application will be running in 3 countries. So we have to have a set of QA and Live build folders for each country.
While publishing the application to each country, we used to manually update the app.config file in the project (have 1 for each country) and deploy to the country specific location. Could this be achieved in the automated builds in some way that for each checkin, a build
gets generated an published to the QA environment of each country by picking the appropriate config file?
Thanks in Advance,
Arun
You can have a different configuration for each country + environment combination (CI-UK, CI-US, QA-UK, QA-US); then in the CI build definition you specify to build all CI configurations for each country (CI-UK and CI-US).
For generating the specific configurations you should use the SlowCheetah Visual Studio add-in.
Through Community TFS Build Extensions, on Codeplex, you can manipulate the config files to deploy and configure a specific environment.
Related
Are there any issues with running a vNext build agent on the same machine that is running Functional Tests? My plan is to have an agent pool that consists primarily of test machines where each build agent has a one-to-one relationship to running functional tests on each respective machine.
Yes, you have the ability to run some Unit Tests both on a machine different from that one is running the build and on the same machine.
To select build agent in a pool which include multiple agents:
You can add a User Capability to that specific build agent then in the
build definition you put that capability as a demand (General tab)
How to specify a build agent in vNext build
About how to configure build pipeline and deploy test agent, you could refer below tutorials:
Running Automated Test on agent machine using vNext Build
TFS — Setup CI/CD pipeline for automated functional tests
Hope this helps.
I'm starting a new Sitecore 9 project using Helix and TDS. I've got my basic structure setup, using Hedgehog's fork of the Habitat site as a guide. I'm also referencing Hedgehog's docs.
My solution is just a start, so it's very simple right now, only a Foundation.Serialization module that contains the TDS projects for the basic layer folders and a Project.Website module that contains a TDS project and an MVC Website project (MVC)....it's got a basic Razor view and some random CSS/JS files.
The TDS Habitat readme, says to use Solution > Deploy Solution to deploy the projects. When I do this on my project it builds and the Sitecore items are deployed to Sitecore, but my Views and CSS/JS are not....presumably because I haven't configured anything to facilitate this.
Looking at the docs and the TDS Habitat solution, it's not clear to me how to configure TDS to know anything about how to deploy files. I'm finding info on the web that says that TDS will deploy files, transform configs, etc but with no examples of how to actually make that happen.
How do I set things up so Deploy Solution will also deploy files from all of the web projects in a solution to my local web root?
First, you will need to make sure the Sitecore Deploy Folder is set. From the documentation:
Sitecore Deploy Folder – Contains the path to the ROOT of the Sitecore
instance on the file system. This setting is used to install the TDS
Classic service when needed and to deploy the compiled code when the
TDS Classic project is built.
You also need to make sure that file deployment has not been disabled:
Disable File Deployment – Stops TDS Classic deploying files to the
directory specified in the Sitecore Deploy Folder.
If you are still not seeing the files being deployed, you will need to check if the process has access to the deploy folder.
You can also deploy files as a .update package and then use another automated tool to deploy the .update package to the target environment.
I figured out the issue. On the properties page for a TDS project there is a field where you indicate which projects should be built and deployed along with the sitecore items:
https://www.hhogdev.com/help/tds/propgeneral
I am very new in TFS, need to implement CICD using TFS 2017 and its build and release feature,
when I tried to run build after creating build definition, I got error like no agent found, I googled and found how to configure agent, but I have logical confusion in my mind as below:
How Agent works with TFS 2017?
Where process of CI will be run on Agent or on TFS server?
Where I need to have msbuild ? where my built code will be placed?
What other dependencies would be there on Agent machine?
all question might be silly but as I have worked with Jenkins and Git, i dont have knowledge of Microsoft technologies, and I can't find well documents for the same.
How Agent works with TFS 2017?
In short to build with TFS, you need to Deploy an agent, in the agent machine you need to install the proper build components/SDKs accordingly based on your project.
Create a build definition. Once a build is triggered , the sources will be downloaded from the TFS repository to the agent machine and then build in the agent machine.
Related documents : Agent pools and queues; Build and Release Agents; Build definition options
Where process of CI will be run on Agent or on TFS server?
You can eanble the CI (turn on the Continuous integration trigger) in build definition. See Configure continuous integration for details. Thus the build will automatically be triggered once changes are checked in.
Related documents: A quick introduction to CI/CD ; Build and release
Where I need to have msbuild ? where my built code will be placed?
For vNext build, it's task based build system. You can define your build definition based on the tasks. See Build and release tasks .
e.g.: You can use MSBuild or Visual Studio Build task, you can specify the MSBuild Arguments as needed.
You can use the utility task: Copy and Publish Build Artifacts and Publish Build Artifacts to specify where the built code will be placed. (Artifact Type : Server/File share path)
What other dependencies would be there on Agent machine?
Refer to the answer for the first question.
We're using the hosted build agent on VSTS to build and release our ASP.NET Core code to Azure App service.
My question is: can we run WebPack to handle front-end tasks on this hosted build on VSTS or do we have to do it manually before checking the code into our repository?
Update:
I'm utilizing the new ASP.NET Core Build (Preview) template that's available on VSTS -- see below:
Here are the steps -- out of the box:
For VSTS we're working on an extension, currently it's in beta phase, you can ask for a share.
Check the VSTS marketplace.
Check this github repo.
Webpack is definitively not a first class citizen for VS2015 and VSTS. Streamlining webpack for CI/CD has been a real headache in my case, especially as webpack was introduced hastily to solve dreadful performance issues with a large monolithic SPA (ASP.NET 4.6, Kendo, 15,000 files, 2000 folders). To cut short, after trying many scenarios to make sure that freshly rebuilt bundles would end up in IIS and Azure webapp, I did a 2-pass build. The sequence of VSTS tasks is as follows: npm install global, npm install local, npm webpack install local, npm webpack install global, build pass 1, webpack, build pass 2, etc... This works with hosted and private agents, providing you supply the proper path for webpack as webpack is installed in a different location in host and in private (did not find a way to chose the webpack install location for consistency). I scorch everything before starting the build. Also need to do these in VS2015 solution : (1) unload "built" folder, and (2) Add Content Include="Built\StarStar" in project file. The "built" folder contains the bundles and should appear greyed, otherwise more bad surprises and instabilities to deal with...
Build-Pass #2 task in VSTS BUILD allows to collect the fresh bundles generated by Build-Pass #1 and includes them automatically in the package to be published.
Without a second build-pass, collecting the bundles and merging them in the zip package is a nightmare, especially when you have 15,000 files to unzip then rezip (300 ms per file!!). Did not find file-merging capability that I could readily use in VSTS.
I have my hears to the ground listening for someone coming up with a more efficient CI/CD scheme for webpack. In the meanwhile, my 2-pass-build workaround is working flawlessly, but slow indeed.
I anticipate that the advances with ASP.NET core, Angular 2 and webpack will look into solving this elegantly.
I am leveraging Visual Studio Team Services Build Vnext to build ASP.NET application present in my Microsoft GIT Repository.
The Microsoft GIT repository is created under an Agile Team Project of the VSTS instance.
The VSTS build is getting executed successfully without any issues.
But I have a query with respect to the cloning activity of the GIT Repository that gets executed on the VSTS Build Agent.
During the build, the VSTS build Agent is cloning the entire master branch of the GIT repository instead of downloading the required ASP.NET application folder.
Is there a way to download the specific application folder on to the build agent instead of the entire branch.
we have this option for the onpremise TFS build having TFS as the Source control.
As far as I know there is no way to pull only a specific folder on a git repository unlike tfsvc. This is why you don't have such an option for the build tasks.