Using Deployment Manager

SteveGTRSteveGTR Posts: 91
edited October 3, 2013 11:02AM in Deployment Manager
I saw the demos of Deployment Manager and was much impressed. We are very interested in giving it a test to replace our manual deployment process.

In looking over your documentation more closely I believe that I mistakenly thought the Deployment Manager had a built-in capability or a method to automatically generate deployment packages. I've come to the conclusion that something needs to feed packages to Deployment Manager in order for this process to be truly automated.

We currently maintain a change script for our databases. We just started using your Source Control tool. We also manually build deployment packages against our Visual Studio project for deploying of the website.

The idea behind the current phase of our testing of your Deployment Manager was to deploy often to a development server; both the website and database.

I'm confused about how to do this in an automated manner. The demo did it automatically behind the scenes and it appeared to me that it was being done by Deployment Manager.

What would you suggest for this part of the process? We currently have a two developers bundle license in addition to the source control licenses. Our source control repository is TFS.

Thanks,
Steve

Comments

  • Hi Steve

    You're quite right- DM is used to publish the packages you give it, but you need some method to create and publish those to begin with.
    The demo you saw probably was an example using TeamCity. We have have a plugin for this that lets you configure it to automatically publish a package to your feed on each check-in to your source control system for example.

    If you're not using a build system right now, there's other ways to publish packages.
    We supply a commandline tool, "RGPublish", which can package up a folder or visual studio project, another commandline called "SQLCI" which can package up a database (in combination with SQL Compare/Data Compare for flexibility) and also addins for both SSMS and Visual Studio for easy package creation.

    These are documented on our website, and i'd suggest looking here to get started.
    Systems Software Engineer

    Redgate Software

  • Steve,

    Let me add one more thought to James' comments. In our setup we struggled with where to store the NuGet packages and how to access them easily, trying different combinations. DM has a built in feed for packages, but we preferred to have a feed independent of DM. We also tried rolling our own using the commonly available cookbooks -- and that was buggy and unreliable.

    We finally settled on two tools that seem to integrate quite well, albeit independently, with DM. The first is ProGet (this creates the actual feed) and the second is NuGet Package Explorer (we use this for building packages.)

    There are automated ways of creating packages. But we prefer to create them by hand using Package Explorer. That ensures that the package content is 100% correct before deployment.

    In summary, for us, the trio of DM, ProGet and NuGet Package Explorer get the job done for us, with a minimum of trouble.
    Michael Woffenden
    Founder and President
    Information Results Corporation
  • Thanks for the information.

    I'm trying to download the RgPublish.exe tool from http://documentation.red-gate.com/displ ... plications page using the Download link and it doesn't work. Tried in both Firefox and IE.
  • Ah... I see, the tool can be downloaded from the Deployment Manager's Tool menu.
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