Default installaion Directory

[anders.jensen]

I would like to be able to change the Default Installation Directory variable, today using i.e.

C:\Octopus\Applications[Tenant name][Environment name][Package name][Package version]\

BUT for us having the Tenant name as part of the path is causing some problems, as this ends up as part of filepath for many applications and scripts. We would like our Tenant names to be the name of the Company we are Deploying to, but this means path will contanin spaces, special symbols and Norwegian Characters that is causing some problems in some cases…

I know of the possibility for setting Custom Installation Directory, but for us this would have to be set for “all” process steps, and, for us, “default”…

[clare.martin]

Good afternoon @anders.jensen,

Thank you for contacting Octopus Support and welcome back to the forums!

Unfortunately I don’t think there is a way to use variables in the default directories.

When you set those up in Octopus using this guide here it puts the hardcoded folder directory you set into a configuration file in windows.

This is read by Octopus on start up but its set at top level, so essentially Windows is reading that configuration file before Octopus starts up, if there were variables in that file Windows would not be able to evaluate them and Octopus would not have fully started yet in order to evaluate them.

Have you got this working at all with C:\Octopus\Applications[Tenant name][Environment name][Package name][Package version]\ on a tenant that does not have any special characters in the name?

I would be interested to know if this does work and if so do you have files in the application folder under a tenant name without special characters that Octopus has put in (therefore proving you can indeed have variables in the Octopus configuration file).

We only have three system variables for tenants:

Which are all deployment variables so you wont be able to use those. The rest are all project and common variables which you wont be able to use for the default applications folder either.

Unfortunately I think the only way for you to do this is to use the custom install directory feature and perhaps use the tenant ID variable - Octopus.Deployment.Tenant.Id instead of the tenant name. This would get around the special character issue. You can find the tenant id of a tenant fairly easily by clicking on the tenant and looking at the URL:

I hope that helps, sorry it is not the news you wanted to hear, let me know if the tenant ID variable gets you what you wanted with a custom install directory.

Kind Regards,
Clare