octopus-deploy

Octopus Deploy 3.11 upwards has a nice new feature to manage SSL certificates that makes it simple to deploy a web app with its x509 SSL certificate in a secure manner. Once it’s setup the developer and deployer don’t even need access to the certificate or admin rights of the web server – all of it is managed and secured by the Octopus server itself. Load the certificate into Octopus Whether they are internal of public someone needs to load the PFX certificate file into the Octopus Certificate Library....

After deploying a website don’t assume it succeeded - add automated tests to check everything works. Back in the old days you would open a browser and check your new version of the site works - make sure IIS is running, the app pools starts, your database login credentials are valid etc. A human sanity check is always good - i still do it often - but ideally I want to know during deployment if something simple like that has caused the deploy to break the system....

Stumbled on a little gotcha today when using nuget packages as deployment artifacts to be send to Octopus Deploy and thought it worth documenting so i don’t forget next time. The quick answer is that you cannot push the same package and version to the built in octopus deploy package repository - if you try you get 400 (Bad Request). Our build process goes a little like this: Install the Octopack nuget package in each deployable project in the solution Compile the solution using Teamcity and msbuild, specifying the octopack build property to output packages msbuild MySolution....

Some stuff I have read in the last couple of weeks that I think are worth checking out, mostly new but some old stuff too. All worth subscribing to. ASP.NET Core is approaching its full release and the polish is starting to shine. Using Kestral it passed node in some benchmark perf a while back, and now it’s getting silly. 1 million requests a second | ageofascent.com 3 top notch free videos from Thoughtworks and Martin Fowler, especially the last one on microservices....

You have a substantial development project with several people working on it and you expect to be around for a while. Having your source built by Teamcity/TFS/Jenkins etc is a good start, but there is plenty more you should probably be doing. To help out, here is my checklist of a good quality continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline. It takes a while and some experience to set it all up but the long term benefits to developer productivity are well worth it....