DB Deployments Part 2: Configuring Octopus Deploy

Where Team City will test and validate your code, Octopus Deploy will manage where that code is deployed. Again there are SQL Change Automation tools we’ll be using to ensure our database code is deployed consistently across our environments. You’ll need to ensure you have a service account (or MSA/gMSA eventually) for the application as well as home for the SQL database it needs. Download the install media and deploy it to your server. We’ve have Octopus deployed side by side with Team City (just on different ports).

Once installed under configuration you can add users and groups to roles as needed. We’ve created groups for the DBA and BI teams so they can log in and see the status of their deployments and added folks to the Administrators group as appropriate. (A quick note: while there is a small teams license for Octopus all users in the app are essentially an admin unless you purchase licensing: You’ll very likely want to purchase a license to take advantage of role based permissions.)

The next piece that needs configuring is Infrastructure. We need to define agents that will do deployments (called deployment targets or tentacles) and define deployment environments. Again we don’t expect our deploy agents to be very busy to start with so we have a single agent that also runs on the app server (just like Team City). Clicking Add Deployment Target Octopus will walk you through installing the agent on a new server: it was pretty painless. At this time we’ll also create a named role for the tentacle that indicates what it might be used for (this is useful if your deployment process spans different servers and you need more than one agent to deploy your code). We only ever deploy to SQL servers so again a single agent and role is sufficient for now. Once we have a target we can define Environments and assign a target that will handle work in that environment. If your environments are highly segmented you may need a target (not on the app server) that is on the right network with the right connection rights (to whichever environment) that the app server can communicate with to do deployments. I have 4 environments: DBA Dev, DBA Test, DBA Stage and DBA Prod that match up with the deployments I will want Octopus to do.

Next we add some objects to the Library tab. Under Variable Sets I am going to define a set of variables called DBA Deployment Locations. These are a standardize variable that we can include in Octopus Projects. I’ve defined the database name and SQL Instance as well as connection string based on those two values. Secondly for Step Templates I browse the library to down and install the Redgate step templates for creating, deploying releases. Additionally I grab the SQL – Execute Script template. I’ve also added two lifecycles that control deployment behavior: DBA Dev which deploys automatically to both the DBA Dev and DBA Test environments and DBA Production with automatically deploys to DBA Stage and is linked to DBA Prod. Lastly you’ll note there is a packages section: this is where Octopus will display packages that have been passed to it. Now we are ready to create our first project!

Projects can be put into groups and I’ve continued the grouping of DBA vs BI projects here as well. Once all that is in place we can create a project to handle specific deployments. Under the project tabs there is an Add Project button. The project needs to have the same name as the Team City project for ease of interoperability. I give it a description and assign it to a group and a Lifecycle. Once on the project page I expand Variables from the navigation pane on the left and click Library Sets. Then in the upper left I click “Include Library Sets.” I choose “DBA Deployment Locations” I just created and click save. I need to create some project variables as well so I can assign specific values to that variable based on the environment the tentacle is connecting to. The really nice thing is that I can overload existing variables I made have added from library sets so I recreate my DB Name and SQL Instance variables. I have different database names and SQL Servers for different environments and I input them all here. The scope for variables is very useful and available just about everywhere in the UI. The nice feature is that you can preview variable values at specific process steps to ensure they are being set properly throughout the deployment process.

I then create two channels to handle the releases and assign a lifecycle to each: Develop gets the default DBA Dev Lifecycle and then Master is associated with the DBA Production Lifecycle. The last bit is to create an actual deployment process. After clicking Process on the left navigation pane under the project we can start adding steps. I have six (although they don’t all run in every environment).

1. The first step will create the database if it does not exist on the SQL instance already. I select “SQL – Execute Script” from the templates available and configure it. I only have one choice of target roles (my single tentacle that is configured) and I select that and then provide the necessary components.

   • Connection string generated based on the SQL Instance variable server=#{SQL Instance};database=master;integrated security=true

   • The SQL script itself which can again be customized with the Octopus variables:
     IF NOT EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM databases WHERE name = '{DB Name}')
BEGIN
CREATE DATABASE [{DB Name}];
END

   • I check the box to marking this step as required for every deployment. If the database isn’t there the rest of the deployment will surely fail.

2. If the database does exist (particularly in staging or prod) I want to back it up before I potentially change it. I add another execute SQL step that backs up the database. When configuring the step I add expand the Conditions section and select “Run for only specific environments” and then only include DBA Stage and DBA Prod. I also require this step before any further steps can be run. The SQL script runs our local backup procedure for the database contained in the variable #{DB Name}.
3. The next step passes the deployment package to the tentacle. Under Package Details we leave the Package Feed as Octopus Server (built in) and give it the name of the project for the Package ID. (I also un-check everything under the Features section as I know we are not using them.) I also ensure the step is required.
4. This step is the actual deployment from the nuget package. This step template is Redgate – Deploy From Package. I need to give it a few things to work.
   • It needs to know which step grabs the package it needs so we point it at step 3.
   • It needs the SQL Instance variable for the target SQL instance as well as the target database name. Optionally we could configure a user name and password but our build agent service account will have the appropriate permissions on the SQL instance.
   • I do give it SQL Compare options (IgnoretSQLt, DecryptEncryptedObjects ¹)
   • Again this step cannot be skipped.
5. If the deployment fails outside of production we’d like to get an email. I configure an email step that is limited to all environments except DBA Prod: super easy since the Environments conditions has a “skip environments” option. Also I limit the step to run only if a previous step has failed.
6. If the deployment fails in production we want someone to be paged: I have a second email step that sends an email to Pagerduty address set up to alert the DBA on call and is restricted to only the DBA Prod environment. Otherwise it is the same as step 5.

Now that the project is configured I can go back to Team City and create a build project and start triggering builds. But that is a post for another day.

The other posts in this series are here:

1. Configuring Team City
2. Building a deployment pipeline.