Inedo Blog | Inedo.com | A collection of articles regarding software best-practices, technologies, and more.

This blog is now deprecated

April 1, 2013 by John Rasch

As of today, this blog is official deprecated in favor of: http://inedo.com/rss

The new RSS feed will contain updates for all sorts of new content additions to the inedo.com website, including news, knowledge base articles, software updates, tutorials, and more! Thank you for following!

Filed under Uncategorized

ProGet, the enterprise NuGet repository is out of Beta!

June 5, 2012 by John Rasch

We’re pleased to announce that our second product, ProGet is out of beta and is available to the public in either a Free Edition or an Enterprise Edition, ideal for teams of any size.

If you haven’t heard of it before, NuGet is a Visual Studio extension that makes it easy to add, remove, and update libraries (“packages”) that use the .NET Framework. Virtually all packages are free and open source, and are hosted at nuget.org/packages.

But there’s a huge benefit for organizations to have their own, private repository so that they can manage in-house and third-party libraries across their enterprise. ProGet is incredibly easy to set-up (just run the installer), has a steep learning curve (developers familiar with NuGet will consume ProGet feeds in the exact same manner), and also provides all the features targeted towards private repositories:

Connectors allow ProGet to act as the official NuGet feed within your organization by forwarding searches and pull requests from other NuGet feeds such as nuget.org
Multiple Feeds can help customize which teams in your organization have access to certain sets of packages
Package Caching allows you to pull packages and their dependencies from a connected feed and store them within your installation for quicker access by your developers
Package Creation makes it easy to create a NuGet Package from a basic library and add it to a feed directly from the ProGet web interface

The Enterprise Edition offers the following features beyond what is included in the Free Edition:

Connector Filters restrict what packages may be retrieved from other feeds, allowing an organization to develop a “white list” of allowed third-party libraries
LDAP Integration is available to seamlessly authenticate users of the software under an existing Windows domain account
Scope Privileges provide a mechanism to specify granular access to the web interface and feeds

If you’re ready to start using ProGet, download the Free Edition today! If you’re interested in the Enterprise Edition, you may begin a free, 45-day trial.

Filed under Announcements, ProGet

Adding SSH to our Agents

April 10, 2012 by Greg Divis

BuildMaster 3.1 is now in available and contains quite a few “under-the-hood” changes. For this release, our main focus has been on improving BuildMaster’s Agents.

An agent is simply what we call a server that BuildMaster is able to orchestrate in some way. In all versions of BuildMaster before 3.1, an agent was always implemented by a .NET-based SOAP web service manually installed on a server. Of course, this provides a great deal of flexibility in the types of actions that can be run on the server, but in practice we have found that many actions can be accomplished with simpler means.

Adding Abstraction

With 3.1, BuildMaster Agents are now extensible. This means that in addition to the SOAP agents (which will continue to work as they always have), we now have the capability to use other techniques to transparently run many actions on remote servers. For example, our Linux extension has been updated to included an SSH/SFTP based agent.

Configuring an SSH Agent

As the SSH-based agents are still considered an experimental feature, we have hidden them from the UI by default at this time. To enable them you will need to first install the Linux extension (v3.1 or newer), and set BuildMaster’s Feature Level to Highly Experimental. After doing so, you should see a new button on the Set-up Agents/External Servers option under Admin.

Here you must configure how BuildMaster will connect to the remove server. Currently, you may use simple user name/password or public/private key authentication. Additionally, you must provide a root path BuildMaster can use for temporary files. BuildMaster will create files and directories under this path for any actions that use default source/target directories or application-relative paths. Once you are satisfied with the configuration, click Save.

Using an SSH Agent

To use an SSH-based agent, you just need to select it like you would any other server in BuildMaster. For example, the Create File Action configured to run on the agent displayed in the previous screenshot might look like this:

We have already migrated many of the built-in actions to the new system, allowing them to run on new classes of agents (like SSH), but some have complex logic or are too platform-specific to run on anything but a hosted SOAP agent. As of release 3.1.0, the following actions will work with SSH agents:

Create File
Create Zip File
Delete Files
Transfer Files
Unzip File
Create Build Artifact
Deploy Build Artifact
Deploy Config File
Execute Command Line
Send Email

This list will continue to grow, but for now we’ve found that you can get pretty far using just these – Execute Command Line in particular can be used to leverage existing shell scripts.

Filed under BuildMaster