Automated deployment and environment-specific configuration

Question

We are using TeamCity and Octopus Deploy to perform CI/CD with the custom WSP's that we use for SharePoint, and I'm currently trying to solve the problem of how to handle environment-specific configuration.

Consider the scenario where we have a WSP, and we add to it a web part which depends on some external web service. I have dev, test, and production environments, and each has a different URL for this web service. Where/how should I store the URL, and how can I set it up so that no manual steps are required to get the correct value saved in each environment?

I would prefer not to depend on anything pre-existing on the server (registry setting, environment name in a property bag, etc) as I'd like my WSP's to be as self-sufficient as possible.

Answer 1

I do not know Octopus Deploy, but I briefly tried TeamCity for this same purpose. The way we did it was to create Environment Variables per build configuration where we set the properties like Server URL etc.

When deploying we used PowerShell scripts that took parameters and in TeamCity, when calling this script we handed off the Environment Variable to it.

This way, your scripts stay generic (not specific to one server) and you can easily configure and reuse the Environment Variables for different Build Configurations (LAB\TEST\PROD).

EDIT: Let's get this variables all the way to your custom code

Now that you've handed off these variables to your deployment scripts, some of them will probably be used during deployment but others may only be needed at runtime of your code. In this case it's very common to use the Property Bag. Easy to set and read from at any time you have access to a SharePoint Context object.

Answer 2

I'm currently leaning towards a solution involving a custom SPPersistedObject, as described here.

You create your own class that derives from the SPPersistedObject and add your settings as properties to the class and marks them with the Persisted attribute.

public class TheSettings: SPPersistedObject {
    public TheSettings() {}

    public TheSettings(string name, SPPersistedObject parent, Guid id) 
        : base(name, parent, id) { }

    [Persisted]
    public string WebServiceUrl;
}

Then you use the SPWebApplication GetChild method to retrieve your settings.

TheSettings settings = webApplication
    .GetChild<TheSettings>("theSettings");

I usually add two static methods to my settings class for easy creating and retrieval of settings:

public static TheSettings GetSettings(SPWebApplication webApplication) {
    TheSettings settings = webApplication.GetChild<TheSettings>("theSettings");
    if(settings == null) {
        return TheSettings.CreateNew(webApplication);
    }
    return settings;
}
public static TheSettings CreateNew(SPWebApplication webApplication) {
   return new TheSettings("theSettings",  webApplication, Guid.NewGuid());
}

I could create a custom Feature Receiver which has the ability to set different settings in different environments, but I still need some way at activation time to tell it which environment to use.