TeamCity best practice setup for multiple branches

Question

I'm looking for advice on the best approach to setup TeamCity/Octopus.

Currently I have multiple branches in TFS2015 - dev, main and release (currently we create a release branch for each release).

Our procedure is to develop in dev and deploy to dev environment. When we are ready for testing we merge from dev to main and deploy to test from main. When happy we create a release branch and deploy to live from the release branch. This is a manual process.

Hotfixes are done on the release branch and deployed to live. We then merge back to main/dev.

I'm totally new to this and so far in a VM playground I've setup TFS2015, TeamCity and Octopus and can check-in to TFS, build/create package on TeamCity and deploy this pack from Octopus. But...

1. I'm unsure how I should setup TeamCity and Octopus to work with multiple branches? Multiple projects for each branch and generate different artifacts?

2. When I do this for real I have a TFS VM, I plan on installing TeamCity and Octopus on this along with the build agent. Is this a bad idea? Should I create a new VM just for TM and Octopus?

Any advice or best practice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Although your question is good in scope, but a good answer must cover many details to be complete.

Let me try to point out the main areas that you will need to further investigate and configure.

TeamCity

A VCS root can be configured to listen to multiple branches via a branch specification

A VCS root can contain multiple projects/solutions and these can be built in multiple steps within TeamCity.

Given that Team City does not support conditional build steps, you will need a different strategy to allow you to vary build steps (and parameters) per release channels / environments.

My recommend approach is to split up the builds into a build definition per release channel (target environment).

• Dev and Feature branches could share a single build definition.
• Master and Hotfix branches can share a single build definition since they both publish to staging/production environments.
• Release branches will need a separate build definition and publish to QA/Testing environment.

This gives you fine grained control over parameter and configurations of each release channel. build a debug version of your app from Dev branch for example at major version 3, while build a release version from Master branch with major version 2.

Every build definition will have a step to publish its artefacts/packages to Octopus Deploy, and specify the channel of which the artifacts belong to.

Octopus Deploy

In Octopus Deploy, define the channels to reflect the release channels, that also reflect your branching model.

Develop, Test, Release are my standard goto channels

Each channel can enforce a different Lifecycle to limit the environments that a channel can deploy to and how an application progresses through your overall ALM cycle.

I know this is not a complete answer. but it is a good start that I hope can help you refine your question to more specific technical details.

Answer 2

We're having somewhat similar CI setup requirements except TFS. In our case workflow for most projects is: GitHub -> TeamCity -> Octopus Deploy.

1. So I'm not sure about multi-branch setup with TFS, but in case with GitHub repos it's pretty easy to configure in TeamCity. You just have to specify branch-related settings in your VCS root (see Branch configuration). When you have configured that, TeamCity will let you run build's for every specified branch separately and will display build statuses for every branch nicely.

In Octopus we use Channels feature to split workflows of releases coming from different branches. That means we have channel-per-branch convention for the projects, so that TeamCity is pushing packaged releases from particular branch (in our case it's develop and master) into it's respective channel in Octopus (see Channels in Octopus).

2. Probably you can setup all the services on single machine but imho it's not the best practice to do performance-wise and scalability-wise.

Answer 3

Off course I don't know you code etc but I think you should step away from merging from dev to test and then creating a version from test. That way you essentially are building a different application compared to the one you were having on dev. Once you merge from test to production and build your application from there, you are releasing a build you haven't been testing.

You should strive for a flow in which you build once and deploy multiple times. So, build one package which you promote from dev to test to production.

Off course you can have a production branch on which you could fix bugs etc. The Channels feature in Octopus works great for scenario's like that.

Answer 4

So answering my own question (sorry), the approach I ended up taking was to simplify my branches and configure TeamCity/Octopus like so...

Branching Strategy

I've moved from

--dev

--main

--release

----release1

----release2

to

--master

--release

----release1

----release2

Master is where most of the devs do their work, when we are ready for a release we have a cut-off point and merge master into a new release branch.

The release branch is deployed to test and any fixes from testing are made on the release branch.

When testing is complete we deploy to live/production from this branch.

This means that the binaries we have tested are exactly the same as the ones we deploy to live/production.

Teamcity

In TeamCity master is automatically built each time a check-in occurs. Then the package is pushed to Octopus. Octopus acts as a repository in this case. TeamCity also creates the release on Octopus. So it should be checkin->build->create release->deploy.

To do this, I have one VCS Root and have a build configuration called Build-Master. This uses the checkout rules to ensure I'm only using the master branch. I use the Ocotpus packaging to build the package then use the OctopusDeploy runner in TeamCity to create a release automatically and deploy to the dev servers.

Release is different. I want to deploy to the test servers manually rather than each time a check-in occurs. When happy promote this to the live production servers.

Any fixes from test will be made to the release branch and deployed to test.

When testing is complete we promote to live and any hotfixes are made on the release branch. Obviously all fixes/hotfixes are merged down to master.

So, in TeamCity to achieve this I have a build configuration called Build-Release. Again, I use the checkout rules to ensure I'm dealing with the correct release branch.

The build creates a package using OctoPack, however this time it's not pushed to Octopus.

Octopus

Octopus has a project specifically for deploying master to our dev servers, for example projectnamehere-dev.

In Octopus, I have a separate project for Test/Prod. I've setup an external feed which points at TeamCity so I can pickup the package created in TeamCity. This is setup in Library->External Feeds.

So, to deploy to test. I create the release branch in TFS and give it a version number, 1,2,3 etc. I then change the Build-Release build config to point at this new branch. Change the version number.

Then in Octopus, I create a release, select this package and deploy to test. Any fixes from testing are made on this release branch. I just build the package again and create a new release and choose the new package.

When testing is complete, in Octopus I just promote the last release to the live production servers.

Channels in Octopus are used on the two projects because they have different life cycles. I also created two new life cycles, the default is dev/test/prod. I created just a dev and then test/prod.

Hope this helps.

Answer 5

In the version control settings -> vcs -> Branch Specifications: "*" ("This will do all branch, filter as needs be" e.g. +:refs/heads/master +:refs/heads/develop)

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Octopus doesn't handle branches, it only deploys, you can however use their rest api, so for example, if test pass in develop then call the octopus rest api to create a new release and deploy.