This blog is part of the series of Continuous Delivery Automation Framework use cases.

Tokenisation of Web Deploy settings file

This content has been moved from the generic CDAF Docs material as it distracted from the common concepts.

In this example, a ASP.NET solution is build is being performed to create a Web Deploy package. Generic properties can be tokenised in the Web.Release.config.

  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="entities"
      connectionString="metadata=res://*/Models.mydb.csdl|res://*/Models.mydb.ssdl|res://*/Models.mydb.msl;provider=System.Data.SqlClient;provider connection string=&quot;data source=%spnDBHost%;initial catalog=%spnDBName%;integrated security=True;multipleactiveresultsets=True;application name=EntityFramework&quot;" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient"
      xdt:Transform="SetAttributes" xdt:Locator="Match(name)"/>
  </connectionStrings>

The construction of web deploy settings for the deploy path is not intuitive and is no longer (after 2010) accessible via the Visual Studio user interface. Edit the .csproj file directly for the Release property group.

  <PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU' ">
    <DebugType>pdbonly</DebugType>
    <Optimize>true</Optimize>
    <OutputPath>bin\</OutputPath>
    <DefineConstants>TRACE</DefineConstants>
    <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport>
    <WarningLevel>4</WarningLevel>
    <DeployIisAppPath>%25webAppSite%25/%25webAppName%25</DeployIisAppPath>
  </PropertyGroup>

In the CDAF.solution:

productVersion=2.3

The EXITIF operation allows the skipping of the build prcess if the built-in variable $ACTION has been set to clean. The MSTOOL operation loads the path to MSBuild.exe into environment variable $env:MS_BUILD. The REPLAC operation detokenises static content file to inject the product version, which includes the built in $BUILDNUMBER. Then the compile of the code and generation of Web Deploy (/T:Package) artefacts is performed:

REMOVE bin
REMOVE obj

Write-Host "If Action is clean only, then exit`n"
EXITIF $ACTION -eq "clean"

Write-Host "Combine to create symantic (http://semver.org/) version`n"
ASSIGN $productVersion+='.'
ASSIGN $productVersion+=$BUILDNUMBER

MSTOOL

Write-Host "PROJECT         : $($PROJECT)"
Write-Host "`$productVersion : $productVersion`n"

Write-Host "[$PROJECT] Apply product version as static content`n"
REPLAC Views\Shared\_Layout.cshtml %productVersion% $productVersion

Write-Host "[$PROJECT] Build Project ($PROJECT) with specific parameters for web deploy.`n"
& "$env:MS_BUILD" $PROJECT.csproj /T:Package /P:Configuration=Release /p:buildNumber=$productVersion

The resulting build is a directory files, which need to be included in your storeFor definition for packaging

<projectname>\obj\Release\Package\<projectname>.deploy.cmd -Flat
<projectname>\obj\Release\Package\<projectname>.SetParameters.xml -Flat
<projectname>\obj\Release\Package\<projectname>.zip -Flat

The SetParameters.xml will contain the DeployIisAppPath from the .csproj file edited above. So now configuration management can be applied at deploy time.

context  target  webAppSite           webAppName  spnDBHost  spnDBName
local    TEST    "Default Web Site"   test        nonprod    test
local    TEST    "Default Web Site"   uat         nonprod    uat
local    PROD    "Default Web Site"   prod        prodsql    prod

During (Local)[https://docs.cdaf.io/mydoc_basics_local_tasks.html] or (Remote)[https://docs.cdaf.io/mydoc_basics_remote_tasks.html] deployment. The deployment task can now detokenise all properties for the application deployment.

Write-Host "Detokenise the settings for this environment`n"
DETOKN aspdotnet.SetParameters.xml

Write-Host "Use Web Deploy to deploy the Aware application`n"
.\<projectname>.deploy.cmd /Y /M:localhost