R – Tools for managing code deployment/versioning for IIS / Windows environments

deploymentiisversion control

I've got a strong background in Linux and OSX, and just left a job where I was architecting systems based on those platforms.

Now I've got a Windows Server running IIS that has a number of different websites that it hosts. Most of them are just a bunch of HTML, JS and Images, with some ASP for some customer tools. (Each website has a different set of customer tools, or they are the same tools, but with minor code changes between them.) I'm also adding a develop web server with the same code, but the 'bleeding edge' stuff.

I need an effective way of managing changes and updates to the overall codebase (henceforth referring to both the images and the html and the asp, for all the sites). When a dev (or webmaster) checks in changes, I want it to show up automatically on the developer server, but should be manually pushed out to the live server. I'd be tempted to just make the websites SVN repositories, but I'd be concerned about the overhead of having the webdeveloper having to log into the server and trigger an SVN update via commandline/tortise (and heaven forbid, manage tags).

Ideally I'd also manage IIS profile settings between the systems, but the major need is to be able to manage the process, and expose it to our ASP developer, and our webmaster, both of which are used to just FTPing up the files to the live site.

So, any recommendations on tools (beyond some SVN hacking with BAT files + teaching the webmaster how to log into the server and do updates) or workflows that would help this out? I even considered an RPM type package (or some Windows equivalent, of course) to manage the live server, but that seems like a bit too much overhead.

Best Answer

First you need to decide how the webmaster knows that the latest in your SCM is ready for deployment (I assume you want some level of acceptance testing after the developer has checked in).

Depending on the above answer you should be able to define the steps to get the "approved" content built and updated on the web server, then it would be a matter of scripting this.

In the end the problem is not the commands to run, but knowing /when/ to run them, and that the last checkin from developers is not necessarily going to work 100% (even without mistakes two concurrent changes, each working, could conflict).

How do you create a new project/repository?

A git repository is simply a directory containing a special .git directory.

This is different from "centralised" version-control systems (like subversion), where a "repository" is hosted on a remote server, which you checkout into a "working copy" directory. With git, your working copy is the repository.

Simply run git init in the directory which contains the files you wish to track.

For example,

cd ~/code/project001/
git init

This creates a .git (hidden) folder in the current directory.

To make a new project, run git init with an additional argument (the name of the directory to be created):

git init project002

(This is equivalent to: mkdir project002 && cd project002 && git init)

To check if the current current path is within a git repository, simply run git status - if it's not a repository, it will report "fatal: Not a git repository"

You could also list the .git directory, and check it contains files/directories similar to the following:

$ ls .git
HEAD         config       hooks/       objects/
branches/    description  info/        refs/

If for whatever reason you wish to "de-git" a repository (you wish to stop using git to track that project). Simply remove the .git directory at the base level of the repository.

cd ~/code/project001/
rm -rf .git/

Caution: This will destroy all revision history, all your tags, everything git has done. It will not touch the "current" files (the files you can currently see), but previous changes, deleted files and so on will be unrecoverable!

R – Subversion and using IIS for ASP.NET development

In a solution in Visual Studio you can have a class library project which is usually in a directory underneath the .sln file.

In this case he also has a web project within the solution but NOT underneath the .sln file in the file directory structure.

He will be attaching to this project via HTTP not via local file path.

IIS will manage this as http://localhost/webapp and by default will place it in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webapp. The files in webapp folder will not be in the repo as they arent in the hierachy of the solution and the class library. This is his question how to sort it out.

My answer is to move http://localhost/webapp to point to a folder that is underneath the .sln file and adjacent to the class library directory then it can all go in the repo.

Seperating the class library and the the webapp is best practice to aide code re-use and decoupling the logic from the web site.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide

How do you create a new project/repository?

R – Subversion and using IIS for ASP.NET development

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