XL Deploy in VSTS/TFS build/release pipelines

Mario Majcica July 19, 2017 0 Comments

Introduction

Circa a year ago I showed you how to use XebiaLabs Team Foundation Server 2015 XL Deploy plugin to create, import and deploy, XL Deploy Deployment Archives, on TFS and VSTS. With a new version of the plugin, that is now renamed into VSTS extension for XL Deploy, XebiaLabs delivers two more build/release tasks. This tasks are supported both by build and release pipelines in VSTS and Team Foundation Server. This will allow us to be more granular and chose to perform only certain operations at each stage, in our pipelines. We can at example choose to create our XL Deploy Deployment Archive during the build and later on, in our release definition, deploy the same artifact in different environments, using XL Deploy.
In the following post, I’ll show you an example on how to achieve this by using our two new tasks, respectively, Package with XL Deploy build task and Deploy with XL Deploy build task.

Building the artifact

As in my previous post, we will keep our Visual Studio Build, however, instead of using the XL Deploy build task, we will add Package With XL Deploy task which you can find in the Package category in the Task Catalog

Once added, we need to point it to the right manifest path, chose if we want the task to set the version of the created package based on the build number and, in our case, Publish the artifact to TFS. In this way once the package is created, it will be uploaded to TFS and associated as an artifact to the current build. At the end the result should be similar to the following.

You can now try your build and at the end, if successful, you should see our DAR package under the build artifacts.

If you can see your artifact uploaded, we can move to the next step.

Deploying from the VSTS Release Management

We are going now to create a new release definition and start with an empty template. As artifact source we are going to indicate a build and select from the relevant drop-down, build definition that we created in our previous step. You also may choose to select a continuous deployment option and a specific build queue for this build.

Once the release definition is created, for your initial Environment, choose Add task and select Deploy with XL Deploy from the task catalog.

This task will allow us to import the DAR package into XL Deploy and trigger the deployment for the desired environment. Bare in mind that it will check if the package is already in XL Deploy and, if so, will skip the import. This means that if you are using it multiple times for different environment definitions, it will behave as efficiently as possible.

Now we need to select the XL Deploy Endpoint, which indicates the instance of XL Deploy we are using for this deployment and fill in the necessary indications about the artifact location and the name of our target environment. For what concerns the XL Deploy Endpoint you can get further information in Add an XL Deploy endpoint in Visual Studio Team Services document. Artifact can be ‘picked up’ from the Server, it means that it will be made available by the release itself, or it can be retrieved from the file share. In our case it will be delivered by the release which will gets it from the associated build.

That’s all! Now we can create a new release and let our task delegate the deployment to XL Deploy.

Conclusion

We saw how can we leverage the new build/release tasks to interact with XL Deploy in different phases of our Build/Release process.

You can find more VSTS specific information at the following link or more information about the VSTS extension for XL Deploy here.

VSTS/TFS Agents behind a proxy

Mario Majcica April 9, 2017 0 Comments

Since I wrote this post things regarding the agents and proxies changed drastically, for good. Now setting up an agent behind the proxy is a documented procedure and can be done directly from the initial configuration of the agent. You can read more about the procedure itself here Run a self-hosted agent behind a web proxy.

It often happens that I do write about my love affair with a web proxy systems. In the past years I shared many of these challenges through my blog. Following is another one that I came lately across and that is precisely, allowing the build agent tasks to gain the access to internet via a proxy.
Till now I have never noticed any necessity for setting explicitly the access via a proxy server on any of our build agents. We were using Azure App Service Deployment and other build/release tasks that did accessed an external web address and everything always worked without the need for any particular intervention. However, after the TFS 2017 Update 1, we noticed that our Azure App Service Deployment task started failing with the following error:

Error: connect ETIMEDOUT 104.45.0.17:443

Clearly the call towards the Azure services was failing. Couldn’t be anything else then our lovely proxy. Strange thing was that it was all working till before the upgrade. At this point I was curious why this was happening. Here is what I found.

With the TFS 2017 Update 1, a new version of the Azure App Service Deployment build/release task has shipped. This new task implementation is now based on Node.js handler and no Node.js applications were able to access the web. So obviously I went to setup the necessary to enable Node.js applications to get the access to the web. This was however not the right solution, also because build agent doesn’t use the Node.js engine installed on that machine, but executes everything via a version of Node.js that is shipped together with the agent itself. In order to get a bit more insight in this, I had to peak in the couple of MS Github repositories and luckily I found a reference in which I see that the Node.js HttpClient wrapper sets the proxy for all calls based on the environment variables called HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY. Now, I tried adding those two variables and voila my build task started working again (after the build agent service restart).

So, in order to have your Node.js based tasks that do need to access Internet from a build agent behind a proxy, add two new environment variables called HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY and set the value of those variables pointing to the proxy itself, like http://my.proxy.local:8080.

Do not forget to restart your agent and give it a go.
I hope this solves it.

Happy releasing!

TFS Tips from the Trenches

Mario Majcica March 20, 2017 2 Comments

In the recent past I came across several interesting techniques to solve a non every day challenges with TFS. Not only that I would like to share those with you, also I would like to leave a trace about this as a note to my future self. I will list several short tips without a particular order.

Let’s start.

Proxy squared

I already wrote about allowing TFS to get the internet access via a proxy server in one of the past articles, TFS 2015 behind a proxy. It is not a very common situation to have a TFS server behind a proxy still in many enterprises it may be the case. My previous post shows how to let the TFS web application to access the web through proxy for TFS 2015 and it is also valid for the TFS 2017. However I missed to mention that there is another component on the application tier that also needs to be set and that is TFS Job Agent. You may ask yourself, why would TFS Job Agent have a need to access the internet? Well if you are trying to set up a web hook in your service hooks and your system needs to communicate with a machine that is out of your network, then the TFS Job Agent needs to be able to do so as it is him that actually sends the request generated by the chosen event. Luckily things are quite simple, move to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 15.0\Application Tier\TFSJobAgent folder and open the TfsJobAgent.exe.config file. The following section needs to be added pointing to your proxy server

</configuration>
  ...   
  <system.net>
    <defaultProxy>
      <proxy usesystemdefault="True" proxyaddress="http://your.proxy.server.com:8080" bypassonlocal="True" />
    </defaultProxy>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

Once you saved these changes, you need to restart the TFS Job Agent. That can be easily done by executing the following from the command prompt with full administrator permissions:

net stop tfsjobagent

followed by

net start tfsjobagent

Now your web hook requests to an external party should succeed.

Browsing TFS from the AppTier machine fails in: ‘Unauthorized: Logon Failed’ error

In case you are not using the machine name to access your TFS server (by using an CNAME in DNS or accessing it via an A-Record that may lets say point to the NLB Virtual IP) you may discover a strange behavior of you Application tier server once it tries to access the service on the localhost. It is not an issue strictly related to the TFS and it has to do with the loopback check security feature that is designed to help prevent reflection attacks on your computer. You can read more about it at KB896861. This also can present an issue in case of TFS 2015 or earlier once you try to setup the Notification URL. A solution to this issue is quite simple and adding a value in the registry will solve it. The following PowerShell command will do the trick:

New-ItemProperty HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0 -Name “BackConnectionHostNames” -Value “your.tfs.com”,”tfs.yourcompany.com” -PropertyType multistring

You need to set the Value to the URL you have chosen for your DNS entries. A server may require a restart in order to make the changes effective.

TFS DB’s under a SQL AlwaysOn replica

Obviously this is not a guide on how to setup an AlwaysOn replica on SQL Server and move your databases under the replication. That is a topic for a much longer post. What I would like to show you here, is what is necessary purely on TFS side in order to get your Application Tier to connect via the SQL Availability Group Listener to the cluster.

Following commands will make that happen:

TFSConfig RegisterDB /SQLInstance:TFS_LISTENER,10010 /databaseName:Tfs_Configuration

and

TFSConfig RemapDBs /DatabaseName:TFS_LISTENER,10010;Tfs_Configuration /SQLInstances:TFS_LISTENER,10010 /AnalysisInstance:TFSAS /AnalysisDatabaseName:Tfs_Analysis

TFSConfig command must be run from an elevated Command Prompt, even if the running user has administrative credentials. To open an elevated Command Prompt, click Start, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as Administrator.
TFSConfig tool is installed in the Tools directory – by default, this will be

• TFS 2017: %programfiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 15.0\Tools
• TFS 2015: %programfiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 14.0\Tools
• TFS 2013: %programfiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 12.0\Tools
• TFS 2012: %programfiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 11.0\Tools
• TFS 2010: %programfiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools

With the first command we will update the name of the server that hosts the TFS configuration database. SQL Instance parameter is pointing to the Availability Group Listener and not the actual instance of the server. 10010 is just the port on which the listener will replay (a non standard port in my case). In case you are on a version of TFS prior to 2017 you will need to include the /usesqlalwayson parameter, which on the TFS2017 is not anymore necessary.
For the second command we will redirect team project collection databases to be accessed via the SQL Availability Group Listener. Again if you are not running the TFS 2017 you will need to specify the /usesqlalwayson parameter at the end.
Make sure that you also specify correctly your analysis server as it is not accessible thought the SQL Availability Group Listener.
Once done do some failover tests and verify the correct functioning of your TFS instance.

More information about the TFSConfig tool can be found at Manage TFS server configuration with TFSConfig page.

Restore permissions for project administrators on Service Hooks

In case you upgraded your TFS instance from TFS 2013 or any previous version to TFS 2015/2017 it may happen in certain cases that the Project Administrators, a role which should have rights in creating and editing Service Hooks, will not be in place. You can add these permissions manually or you can use a tool provided by Microsoft to check the current situation and correct it is necessary. I made some changes to this tool giving you the opportunity to do that for all of the projects and collections on your instance. A fork of the tool can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/mmajcica/vsts-integration-samples.
Once you have downloaded and compiled the code, just run the command line tool with /Server parameter and specify the full path towards your service, like http://mytfs:8080/tfs. This will be sufficient for it to check and, if necessary, correct the missing rights. Same can be done for only a specific collection by using /collection parameter and passing in the path towards the desired collection, like http://mytfs:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection

Controlling and debugging TFS Jobs from DB

Often when you are checking your jobs and you realize that something went wrong, you need to analyze your issues in detail and retry failing jobs. This is usually done via a web services, however, it can also be done directly by querying the DB. I find the second approach often quicker and easier. Let me show you a couple of tricks and where is the necessary data located.

First thing first. Before we are able to do anything further we need to find the Id of the Job that we are looking to operate with. Let’s assume that I’m looking for ‘Reporting Service Path Rename’ Job, which in my case is failing.

Jobs can be defined in the Collection database as they can be defined in the Tfs_Configuration database. This specific one is on the collection level, so I will execute the following query on the collection DB.

SELECT JobId FROM tbl_JobDefinition WHERE JobName like '%report%'

At this point you should get back the JobId which we will use later for obtaining the execution history and to put a new job in the queue.
In my case the above query returned the following GUID: 6322B69A-04BD-47DF-9390-C3185ED59287

Now, on the Tfs_Configuration database you can now check the state of the above job with the following query:

SELECT * FROM tbl_JobHistory WHERE JobId = '6322B69A-04BD-47DF-9390-C3185ED59287' AND NOT Result = 0 ORDER BY StartTime DESC

This will bring us all of the failed runs for the given job in the chronological order. You can get valuable information from the result of this query. In particular I need to get the information about the JobSource which indicates the collection for which this job is failing
In order to get the collection ID <=> Collection Name mappings, you can check the follwoing table:

SELECT * FROM tbl_ServiceHost ORDER BY Name

Let’s get to the point, lets trigger again the job from my example that was failing. This is the query that will create a new run for the given job:

DECLARE @jobSource UNIQUEIDENTIFIER
DECLARE @jobs typ_GuidInt32Table
SELECT  @jobSource = 'C64929FF-9329-4123-BF82-F021DDCBE0C3'
INSERT INTO @jobs VALUES('6322B69A-04BD-47DF-9390-C3185ED59287', '1')

EXEC prc_QueueJobs @jobSource, @jobs, 15, 0

As you can see, we used the job id that we retrieved earlier and the collection for which this is going to be triggered (as it is a collection specific job). Last thing left for us to do is to verify the state of the run and we can do that by checking on the tbl_JobQueue for all of the running jobs:

SELECT * FROM tbl_JobQueue WHERE JobState = '1'

Now that you know the tables and SP’s in play, you can try it and proceed on your own.

Be very careful with modifying TFS DB! It is for sure a non recommended practice! 🙂

Conclusion

These are only some of many issues solved in the past for which I haven’t found a solution by simply asking Google. I hope these information will let you avoid spending hours in finding a valid solution to your TFS challenges.