使用Visual Studio Team Services构建ASP.NET网站并将其发布到VPS Windows Server 2012 R2

Question

I am currently using Visual Studio Team Services (was VS Online) to version control my projects. When I want to deploy my projects to my VPS I use the Visual Studio Publish that stores the files on my hard drive and then I use an FTP client to send the files to my VPS.

But now I am viewing the build and release functions in Visual Studio Team Services. But I don't completely understand it all.

Questions:

• What is the purpose of the build?

I have created a new standard build definition using the Visual Studio template and used the Host agent pool.

When I run the build I can see that it creates a new version using the last commit as reference. But what has it done in the backend on the host agent?

And where are the files stored of this new created build? In the log I see Copy Files to: $(build.artifactstagingdirectory) but where is this?

• What is the purpose of the release?

I have created a new release plan using the empty template because I don't have Azure, I use another company where I have a VPS running.

I then added 3 environments called Development , Staging and Production .

All of them using the Host agent, but I think here I need to adjust this because if I understand it I now can assign my VPS to my Production environment or not?

Does someone has done this using Visual Studio Team Services and a VPS that runs on Windows Server 2012?

Are there videos or docs available about this because its quite confusing what the correct steps are in deploying versions of web projects.

Answer 1

In general, "Build" focus on integrating and building your code changes and run some basic unit tests. And "Release" is used to deploy the output of "Build" to your environments so that you can run some future tests/verification and final deploy the output to a production environment for your customers to use. See this link for reference: What is the difference between build and release engineering, DevOps and site reliability engineering?

When you start a build without any source version specified, it will get the latest version of the code and then build the code. All the files are placed in the working folder of the build agent during the build process. $(build.artifactstagingdirectory) is a predefined variable that point to a path in the build agent work folder. We usually copy the build output to this path so that we can access to output easily in the following tasks. For example, use "Publish Artifact" task to publish the output files in $(build.artifactstagingdirectory) folder to the server or a file share, and then the team members can get this build from server or file share.

In the release, you can link a release to the build definition. When the release starts, it will get the latest artifacts of the build and deploy to your environment.

The agent is a machine used to execute the tasks in build/release definition. Hosted agent is managed by Azure and you can also deploy your own build agent . So you don't need to change the agent settings for "Production" environment if your VPS can be accessed by the Hosted agent. Since you are using FTP to upload files to your VPS previously, you can still use this method to publish the files by adding a FTP Uploader task in release definition.

For more information, refer to Build and Release Management for details.