CF Deployment

Previous: CI Setup

In this section, we'll update the pipeline to deploy to our local instance of CF Dev. If you have not installed it, follow the instructions here.

---

Build

First off, add a new job to the pipeline, build-deploy:

jobs:
  # ... (test job)
  - name: build-deploy
    plan:
      - get: repo
        trigger: true
        passed: [test]
      - task: build
        file: repo/ci/tasks/build.yml
        params:
          PROJECT_NAME: NotesApp

build-deploy fetches the version of the repository that has passed the test job and then runs the build task.

ci/tasks/build.yml:

platform: linux

image_resource:
  type: docker-image
  source:
    repository: microsoft/dotnet
    tag: 2.2-sdk

inputs:
  - name: repo

outputs:
  - name: published

run:
  path: ./repo/ci/tasks/build.sh

This file will look very similiar to that of test.yml, except that there is an output of the published directory.

ci/tasks/build.sh:

#!/bin/bash

set -ex

pushd repo
    dotnet publish $PROJECT_NAME -o ../../published
popd

Again, very similar to test.sh, except that it's publishing the project, which compiles all the DLL files that comprise the app.

---

Deploy

Update the pipeline.yml file with the following resource:

resources:
    # ... (repo resource)
    - name: cf-deploy
      type: cf
      source:
        api: {{cf-api}}
        username: {{cf-username}}
        password: {{cf-password}}
        organization: {{cf-organization}}
        space: {{cf-space}}
        skip_cert_check: true

Refer to CF Dev for credential information for your CF Dev instance. Place the substitutions in your credentials.yml. Also note that skip_cert_check is set to true. This is because we're running CF Dev locally without a cert. For production, remove this line.

Add a task to the build-deploy job for deploying the app, using the published directory as the source:

jobs:
  # ... (test job)
  - name: build-deploy
    plan:
      # ... (get repo task)
      # ... (build task)
      - put: cf-deploy
        params:
          manifest: repo/ci/manifest.yml
          path: published

---

For deploying to Cloud Foundry, we need to specify a buildpack for it to use when running the app. In our case, we want to use dotnet-core-buildpack since we have a .NET Core app.

ci/manifest.yml:

applications:
  - name: notes
    buildpack: <BUILDPACK_NAME>

If you have the dotnet-core-buildpack installed in you CF environment, you can just use dotnet-core-buildpack for BUILDPACK_NAME. Otherwise, you can try directly referring to a buildpack via https://github.com/cloudfoundry/dotnet-core-buildpack.git#<TAG_NAME> where TAG_NAME is the tag name from https://github.com/cloudfoundry/dotnet-core-buildpack/releases.

You can see a list of available buildpacks on your CF environment by running:

cf buildpacks

---

Within Program.cs, add the following lines.

Before .UseContentRoot(...) add

.UseCloudFoundryHosting()

and after the .AddJsonFile(...) lines, add

.AddCloudFoundry()
.AddEnvironmentVariables();

These will allow the app to make use of the Cloud Foundry environment when pushed.

---

Update the pipeline with fly from within the ci directory:

fly -t targetname set-pipeline -p pipeline -c pipeline.yml -l variables.yml

Then push up the changes to GitHub.

Your pipeline should look like this:

---

Use postman to make an GET call to https://notes.dev.cfdev.sh/api/notes. Instead of an HTTP 200, we get an HTTP 500. That indicates the app was deployed but is encountering an issue. Get the recent logs with:

cf logs notes --recent

You should see:

MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlException (0x80004005): Unable to connect to any of the specified MySQL hosts.

We need to update our hosted app, since it can't talk to our local MySQL database.

Up Next: Connect to a DB on CF