TFS Deploy WITHOUT using WebDeploy

Question

I'm trying to setup our CI build environment and having an issue.

First, I'm using VS and TFS 2012 so I can't use the *.12.xaml templates since those are for VS/TFS 2013.

Second, right now I'm configured to use just the defaulttemplate.11.xaml. Originally, I was using WebDeploy for the deployment method and that was working great. Since then, our web/server team has re-configured our test environment to use IIS Shared Configuration as well as DFS Replication to keep everything in sync.

Because of that, I'm no longer able to use WebDeploy (I passed this post over to the TFS admins, but they said no).

Is there a place where I can add some msbuild arguments, or a post-build event where I can send a *.cmd file with some arguments so I can get my code copied/deployed?

I've read Hanselman's (and everyone else that copied him) posts/blogs that say "if you're using xcopy, you're doing it wrong, etc...", but I believe in my case I CAN'T use Web Deploy.

Update:

So I thought I found my answer. Since the web deploy doesn't work for me, I found a workflow activity called CopyDirectory that sounded exactly like what I need.

I went through the process of updating my default template to add this additional step to the build process, which by the way, does NOT work very well. After adding the step, saving, etc, the step doesn't ever show up in my build output. I gave up for awhile to go see if I could do this on our Jenkins build server, got some different errors over there so I came back to TFS to make the changes and commit. Since the CI was still setup in TFS (granted, failing), I noticed that a build got kicked off when I made my commit. I decided to watch for awhile and IT FINISHED SUCCESSFULLY! Woah, all right. So I checked through the build logs, and find out that it threw a WARNING saying "failed to copy. Ensure the source directory exists and that you have the appropriate permissions".

Well, since I just entered this value incorrectly, no big deal, just change to the correct BuildDetail.DropLocation, and we should be golden.

WRONG, after building again with my changes to the source and destination values, I come to find out that since I'm trying to deploy my files to a different domain, it still fails.

Oh, and in addition to that, YOU CAN'T PASS CREDENTIALS TO THE COPYDIRECTORY STEP! REALLY! Phew, I found some documentation though, it says "give the tfs build service/account permissions on the domain that you want to copy to. Well, that would be great, if my server team would allow that, but they don't.

Back to square one...(this is going to turn into a blog about me complaining about TFS...)

Answer 1

I believe you can do it using robocopy. You will want to update your build template to include a new InvokeProcess activity. Set the activity's FileName to "RoboCopy" (include the quotes) and it's Arguments to something like the following:

String.Format(" ""{0}"" ""{1}"" /E /R:10 /W:10 /NFL /NDL ", BinariesDirectory, BuildDetail.DropLocation)

Of course changing the robocopy flags to your specific needs.

I don't think you can pass credentials into robocopy either though, so you might still be SOL there.

One possible alternative though is that because your admins won't give the TFS Build User (i.e. tfsservice) permissions on the destination box, you could change the TFS Builds to run as a different User that does have permissions on that box. To do this I believe you just have to log onto your TFS Build machine, go to the Services, find the Visual Studio Team Foundation Build Service Host 2012 (or something similar), and change the Log On As user from tfsservice to whatever user has permissions on the box that you want to publish to. Of course you will also need to give that user permissions to do everything else that the build system needs to do (download source code, etc.).