Tag Archives: Deep Dive Series

LifeCycles: Guard rails for your deployments

July 17, 2015 by ianpaullin
No comments
In Octopus Deploy 2.6, a new feature was introduced: LifeCycles. You may be on a previous version of Octopus Deploy (2.5 or below) or you may have simply dismissed LifeCycles, but this deep dive is to encourage you to use them. They take a little bit of time to understand, but once you do they keep you disciplined and have substantial payoff with practically no overhead. In a nutshell, LifeCycles gives three key abilities: an easy, consistent deployment workflow with gated deployments to control the order of promotions to Continue reading →

Variables are your friend

July 2, 2015 by ianpaullin
3 comments
To truly harness and appreciate the power and elegance of Octopus Deploy, you need to use variables. Variables are not a foreign concept to programmers, but within Octopus there are a few different types of variables available which may cause a little confusion. We’ll cover all these different types of variables in this deep dive, how to wield variables to your advantage and best practices. Let’s get started and jump right in. You may have seen the Variables tab on the left hand side of your project like so: Continue reading →

The Octo.exe – your utility knife for automation

February 27, 2015 by ianpaullin
6 comments
If you’ve started using Octopus Deploy and want to fully maximize it’s potential via automation but you don’t know where to start, you need to begin investigating the Octo.exe. The Octo.exe is a neat little utility that allows you, through the command-line (and by extension, PowerShell) to interact with your Octopus Server without using the web interface. There’s a number of functions that the Octo.exe serves but from a high-level, it’s all about interacting with your projects. Whether it’s deleting an old release to creating a new release Continue reading →

Versioning in Octopus Deploy (Part I)

January 27, 2015 by ianpaullin
4 comments
Versioning – NuGet and Octopus Deploy will force this issue of versioning on your projects and it’s in your best interest to give it some thought. Within Octopus, your releases are versioned as well as your NuGet packages however packages are versioned externally of Octopus, so some prudence will pay dividends down the road. I’ve found that one of the biggest hurdles with versioning is where to begin. NuGet and Microsoft have differences in their versioning system and there’s no apparent clear-cut path on what to do. In this deep dive, I hope Continue reading →

Users, Teams, User Roles and Permissions

October 9, 2014 by ianpaullin
No comments
In this post of our Octopus Deep Dive Series, we’re covering users, teams and user roles. I’ve learned that out of all the topics within Octopus Deploy, user management and permissions can be daunting depending on how customized you want your configuration. It took me some time to figure out how best to leverage security for a large number of teams using one customized security model. With any luck, I can save you some time and give you some new ideas to incorporate into your security model within Octopus Deploy. Octopus’s user management Continue reading →

Leveraging Server Roles

September 10, 2014 by ianpaullin
One comment
This is the first article of my Octopus Deploy Deep Dive Series. I’m looking to dive into specifics within Octopus Deploy. There’s lots to cover and today were going to dive into Machine Roles or just plain old Roles. Octopus has roles for team permissions so to avoid confusion for this article, the context of roles is in reference to Server Roles or Machine Roles. When you add a tentacle to an Octopus Deploy server, you have to specify at least one role for that tentacle. I’ve covered Continue reading →