Umbraco and Continuous Delivery/Deployment

Question

I am working with Umbraco for almost two months now, so I am still faily new. The company I work at uses DTAP for alot of project, but for none of the Umbraco based website are supported.

We use a Umbraco Courier (cheap version) for synchronizing environments, but this is all done by hand.

How is it possible to do continuous delivery with a CMS like Umbraco?

Answer 1

Whole CI / CD strategy depends on the architecture and requirements. It's almost the same as typical ASP.NET application process with couple additional aspects about which we need to take care of.

In case of Umbraco-specific solutions, definitely the easiest and more and more popular way to handle those processes is to use Umbraco Cloud ( https://umbraco.com/cloud ), which gives you ability to have multiple enviroments, advanced options to transfer not only document types and templates or static files, but also content (using Courier in the most advanced and up to date version). It's also easy to maintain, update etc.

As Umbraco Cloud is not perfect for each scenario (costs, anti-cloud movement etc.) and some companies / developers wants to have more control over the whole process, there are some other possibilities:

1. TeamCity ( https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/ ) - probably the most popular tool used to handle builds. It requires to be installed and deployed on your server. It's usually used with additon of Octopus Deploy ( https://octopus.com/ ) which is perfect for performing all types of deploys.
2. AppVeyor ( https://www.appveyor.com/ ) - great "all-in-one" tool working in a "as a service" mode totally online. Really powerfull and easy to use.

All of the above, combined with some optimalization and automation with source control systems will give you the powerful toy to automate your development and deployment processes.