We have a development,uat and production environment for our angular/java/mongodb app. At the moment we are moving our deploying the same build to dev and uat. The problem with that is that some things are not finished and basically not ready to be deployed to uat. What is a good way of managing/selecting which commits/changesets are to be deployed to uat/prod? If I know which commits I want is how can I accomplish this?
The use case we have is that some builds need to be tested (by other jobs) before we know if they are good enough to deploy / release.
We use the "Promoted Builds Plugin" for that. There is a manual promotion process as well.
Related
I am working with Octopus deployment tool. We have a situation where we should not promote the binaries from DEV to QA. This is due to the reason where some features are still in development. We have another branch MAIN from where all the feature will be released. From here we will be generating build and deploying to QA and PROD.
In order to keep the build environment intact, we need to build and deploy only to DEV and should not be promoted.
I thought of creating a separate project specifically for DEV environment.
Before proceeding with this approach, I wanted to know if there any other better solution.
Raaj
You could create a separate lifecycle that has only the DEV environment in it to prevent it from being promoted. Octopus has a feature called channels which allows you to create releases that are only able to be deployed to the defined environments within that unique lifecycle.
https://octopus.com/docs/deployment-process/channels
I have a website on AppEngine that is 99% static. It is running on Python 2.7 runtime. Now the time has come to evolve this webapp, and since I have almost none Python code in it, I'd prefer to write it in Go instead.
Can I change runtime from Python 2.7 to Go, while keeping the project intact? Specifically, I want to keep the same app-ID, the same custom domain attached to it, the same SSL certificate, and so on.
What do I have to do in order to do that? I surely have to change runtime in the app.yaml. Is there anything else?
Bonus question: will such change happen without a downtime?
I'd be grateful for any links to documentation on exactly that (swapping runtime on a live app). I can't find any.
Specify a runtime as well as a new value for version. When deployed you'll have an older version that is Python and a newer version that is Go. There won't be any downtime (same as when deploying a newer version of Python).
Rather than trusting links/docs (that may be out of date or not 100% exactly what you're trying to do), why not create a new GAE-Std project for testing purposes and try it yourself. Having a GAE-Std test project is good for testing new function (especially by other testers who won't have access to the dev environ on your laptop).
The GAE services offer complete code isolation. So it should be possible to simply deploy a new version of the service, which can be written in a different language or even use a different GAE (standard/flex) environment. Personally I didn't go through a language change, but I did go through a split of a single-service app into a multi-service one, I see no reason for which the same principles wouldn't apply.
Maybe develop the new version as a separate app first, to be able to test it properly without risking an accidental impact on the old version and only after that bring the code as a new version in the old app. That'd be using the GAE project isolation. You can, in fact, test the entire version migration as a separate app if you so desire without even touching the existing app. I am using this technique - a separate app ID - to implement a staging environment for my app, completely isolated from my production app, see How to copy / clone entire Google App Engine Project
Make sure to not switch traffic to the new version at deployment time. This keeps the app working with the old version. Test first that the new version works as expected using Targeted routing. Then maybe use Splitting traffic across multiple versions to perform A/B testing with just a small percentage of the traffic going to the new version. Finally, when happy with the results, switch all traffic to the new version.
You need to pay special attention to the app-level configs (dispatch, cron, queue, datastore indexes), shared by all services/versions. They need to be functionally equivalent in the 2 versions. The service isolation doesn't apply to them, only project isolation can ensure no impact to the old version.
There should be no need to make any change to the app ID, custom domain mapping or SSL config. The above mentioned tests should confirm that.
A few potentially interesting posts related to re-working services/modules:
Converting App Engine frontend versions to modules
Google App Engine upgrading part by part
Migrating to app engine modules, test versions first?
Advantages of implementing CI/CD environments at GAE project/app level vs service/module level?
Google app engine refuses to deploy my latest build, and looking at the releases list, I can see that another build has been 'deploying' for the better part of a week.
Google doesn't offer support anymore for this without paying for it, but this is stuff that just shouldn't happen.
Hope one of you google engineers out there can help me with this. The google project is caleld vxlpay.
Have you tried doing an appcfg rollback?
Please cancel the deployment if it gets stuck; just waiting for it to finish often leads to frustration and desk-flipping. There's a few ways to help you deploy the app.
1) Generally, you can simply redeploy after waiting a few minutes.
2) Redeploy with another deployment method (appcfg, Google App Launcher, Eclipse...)
3) Rollback then redeploy
If all 3 fails, there might be something wrong with your configuration and you would probably need to speak to the support engineers at Google.
I ran into to this just now.
I think my issue had something to do with having a browser open to the site I was trying to deploy to. Apparently that was locking up a process or something because, when I closed it, my deploy finished.
Silly, yes. I think it has something to do with GAE attempting to migrate traffic but not dealing with cases where there's browsers open... There's probably a feature that allows for deploying and controlling whether or not traffic is migrated.
I'll have to give that a try to see if closing the connection (browser) resolved it or if it was just a timing thing.
Nope... Just takes an absurdly long time.
Maybe it's due to file sizes?
Note: This only occurs when deploying a Flex environment rather a standard one.
For a research project I am comparing PaaS providers. I'm however not sure about the following. On App Engine I can have multiple live versions of my application. If I have a new version and I deploy it I can reach it on a non-default url like: versionX.myapp.appspot.com. I can use that url to test it while running on the PaaS. Once I'm happy with the result I will change the default version and my visitors will also see the changes.
I am wondering if Openshift has something simular? Only thing I found so far is that it deploys on git push and if it fails to build it will leave the old version live. This of course still leaves a risk for functional errors. If I then still have to install a test-server locally I am still doing system administration and it would be nice if this can be prevented.
How is this best resolved when using openshift?
Edit: I did found this article: https://www.openshift.com/blogs/release-management-in-the-cloud
Is that the way to or are there other common ways to do this?
The best way to re-create the google functionality would be to run a dev/qa instance on a separate gear and add those git repositories as remotes to your local git working copy, then you can git push to any environment for testing before you deploy to production.
This is a subject of common discussion, but through all my research I have not actually found a sound answer to this.
I develop my websites offline, and then launch them live through my hosting account.
I utilize codeigniter, and on that basis there are some fundamental differences between my offline and online copies, namely base urls and database configurations. As such I cannot simply develop and test my websites offline and then upload them as it requires small configuration changes which are easy to overlook and good lead to a none working live website.
The other factor is that when I am developing offline, I might add a database table or a column whilst creating some functionality. When I upload my local developments to my host, they often do not work as I have forgotten to upload the new database structure. Obviously this cannot happen - there cannot be any opportunity for a damaged or broken live website.
Further to this, I'd like to be able to have logs of my development - version control of sorts such that if i develop a feature, and then something else stops working I can easily look backwards to at least see the code changes which could have caused the change.
My fourth requirement is as follows: if i go away on holiday for a week without my development laptop, and then get a bug report, I have no way of fixing it. If i fix it on the live copy, not only is it dangerous, but i'll inevitably not update it on my local copy - as such when i update my live copy next time, that change will be lost. Is there a way that on any computer i can access my development setup, edit and test, launch to the live site, whilst also committing it such that my laptop local copy is up to date.
So yes.. in general im looking for a solution to make my development processes more efficient/suitable. Any ideas?
Thanks
Don't deploy by simply copying. Deploy by using a script (I use Apache Ant) that will automate the copy of specific files for each environment, the replacement of some values, etc.
This just needs rigor. Make a todo list while developing, and check that every modification on the server is done. You might also test the deploy procedure on a pre-production server which has an similar configuration as the production server, make sure everything is OK, and then apply the same, tested procedure on the production server
Just use a version control system. SVN or Git are two free candidates.
Make your version control server available from anywhere. If it's an open-source project, free hosting solutions exist. Of course, if you don't have a development computer wvailable, you'll have to checkout the whole project, and probably install some tools to be able to develop, test and deploy. Just try to make it as easy as possible, or always have your laptop available. If you plan to work, have your toolbox with you. If you don't plan to work, then don't work. When you have finished some development, commit to the server. When you go back to your laptop, update your working copy from the server.
Small additions and clarifications to JB
Use any VCS, which can work (in a good way) with branches - your local and prod systems are good candidates for separate branches, where you share common code but have branch-specific config. It'll require some changes in your everyday workflow (code in "test", merge finished with "prod", deploy /by tools, not hand/ only after merge...), but it's fair price
Changing of workflow, again. As JB noted - don't deploy by hand, don't deploy wrong branch, don't deploy "prod" before finished merge. But now build-tools are rather smart, you can check such pre-condition inside builder
Just use VCS, maybe DVCS will be somehow better. I say strong "No-no" for Git as first VCS, but you have wide choice even without it - SVN (poor branch|merge comparing to DVCS), Bazaar (not a tool of my dream, but, who knows), Mercurial, Fossil SCM, Monotone
Don't work on live, never do anyting outside your SCM. One source of changes is a rule of happy developer. Or don't work at all at free-time, or have codebase always reacheable for you (free code-hosting /GoogleCode, SourceForge, BitBucket, Github, Assembla, LaunchPad/ or own server), get it as needed, change, save, deploy