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Gary McGill
Gary McGill

Reputation: 27536

How can I configure a website to start automatically using TFS release management?

[I'm posting this to record what I actually found out after hours of painful trial-and-error.]

I have a website that I need to be "always running" (because in this case it has a Hangfire job that's responsible for kicking off a scheduled task every 5 minutes), and by default, websites are only started up when the first request is received.

So, how can I ensure that the website is started automatically? And, how can I configure this via the TFS release management tool?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 8126

Answers (1)

Gary McGill
Gary McGill

Reputation: 27536

[This answer isn't specific to Hangfire, but see the Hangfire documentation's discussion of this issue for details of how it affects Hangfire, but note that the recommended work-around is somewhat involved, and much more complex than the solution below. See also a separate and quite comprehensive discussion on the Hangfire support forum that gives several alternative solutions.]

In IIS, each website is associated with an Application Pool (App Pool). You can configure your App Pool to start automatically via IIS Manager by changing the "Start Mode" to AlwaysRunning in "Advanced Settings" for the App Pool:

enter image description here

However, starting the App Pool doesn't start the website (or websites) associated with it. The website does not get loaded until the first request is received.

In IIS8 (or IIS7.5 with an extension), a new setting was added that allows us to work around this. You can ensure that the website gets sent a request as soon as the App Pool starts by setting "Preload Enabled" to True in "Advanced Settings" for the website:

enter image description here

The combination of these settings ensure that the website will automatically start up when IIS starts, and immediately after the App Pool is recycled, etc.

But, how can you get those settings applied automatically as part of a TFS release pipeline, rather than having to remember to set them manually?

In your release definition, you presumably have an "IIS Web App Management" task, which sets up the App Pool and the website. In the configuration panel for this step, there should be an "Advanced" box with an "Additional AppCmd.exe Commands" entry field. You can use AppCmd to apply the settings described above.

AppCmd has the most confusing command-line syntax I've yet seen outside of code-golf competitions, but here's the incantation that worked for me:

set config /section:applicationPools -[name='myAppPoolName'].startMode:AlwaysRunning

set app "mySiteName/" /preloadEnabled:true

Note that if you have configuration variables defined for your App Pool name and website name, then you can use those rather than hard-coding the name, such as:

set config /section:applicationPools -[name='$(appPoolName)'].startMode:AlwaysRunning

I hope this helps somebody... Thanks for listening :-)

Upvotes: 21

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