CODEWITHSUNDEEP
tfsdeploymentbuildtfs-2015
Holt
Holt

Reputation: 452

Can a TFS2015 script only Deploy (and not Build)?

I am new to the world of scripting with TFS2015. I created a script that builds all of the projects within my solution (it is a rather large solution) and puts it out in a shared folder (where each project has its own subfolder).

I would like to create a separate script for each project that simply copies the bin folder from the shared and pastes it out on my Test environment. I rarely need to deploy everything, so the idea is one build...multiple deploys.

However, when I run my deploy script using the Copy Files step it is doing another build. Although it copies the files that I expect, it is after a full build that creates the folder structure for the build.

Am I able to make the Copy Files step NOT do a Build?

Here is the steps that my script is curently doing:

enter image description here

As you can see, there is only one step (Copy Files) but it still does the Get sources and copies everything into a new folder on the build box like so (where the number keeps incrementing up with each run of the script):

enter image description here

I just want to copy the files from the Source to the Target and not do a build or Get Sources.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 41

Answers (1)

jessehouwing
jessehouwing

Reputation: 114721

It looks like you're still on TFS 2015 RTM or Update 1. Which is already pretty old technology if you compare it to the lifetime of the new build system which was introduced with this version.

TFS 2015 update 2 has introduced a similar system to the Build pipelines to orchestrate Releases. This doesn't require you to map any workspaces or git repositories and can act on the artefacts of your builds or simply on the contents of file shares.

enter image description here

It makes sense that a Build has to build something and in order to build something, it has to get the things to build. If you're actually not building something, then you're probably deploying or releasing or packaging something else. Hence the distinction between Build and Release pipelines.

TFS 2017+ has an option to disable the syncing of sources. Primarily to allow people to get the sources themselves in creative ways (e.g. a custom powershell script that invokes git.exe).

My primary advice would be to upgrade to TFS 2018 update 3 or at least TFS 2017 update 3.1, worst case TFS 2015 update 4.1. The fact that versions older than update 2015.4.1 have a known XSS scripting security bug may be reason enough to convince your organisation to perform this update.

Barring that option you're left with one solution:

Link your build definition either to a git repository with only a single commit (If I remember correctly the 2015 agent still crashes when syncing an empty Git repo) or link it to a TFVC repository and set the workspace settings to cloak everything. This essentially causes the build to sync an empty folder, which it can cache, before calling your powershell script.

Upvotes: 1

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