Directly using Calimari for development local deploys

Hello,

One of the issues we are working with right now is the discrepancy between production deployments, and deployments to a developer’s local workstation. We toyed with the idea of adding developer workstations to Octopus, but this resulted in a ton of complexities.

The plan right now is that Octopus calls scripts in each package (using the new 3.3 feature), and in development, the developer would run those same scripts. However, it seems to me that if developers have the deployment packages, they could run Calimari, which would result in a process that exactly matches what happens in production. Is this a workable idea? Any gotchas? Has anyone tried this?

Thanks!
Erick

Hi Erick,

Thanks for getting in touch! What you are describing is pretty much what our offline drop targets do. Put all the stuff you need in a folder with Calamari and run the commands.
There are some limitations however that might not matter to you. There are things that can only be managed by the Octopus Server and its orchestration such as manual intervention steps, email steps, and output variables between steps.

Your best bet to see if this will work for you would be to create an offline drop target for that environment type, and see if it works!

Hope that helps!
Vanessa

Thanks for the quick response Vanessa. The limitations make sense. I didn’t realize that is how offline deployments worked.

Is there a page somewhere that has this kind of content? Not a manual (the current one is excellent already), but more like “how to do developer machine deployments” or “best practices for variable sets”.

Thanks!

Hi Erick,

We do not really have any documentation or blog posts on these kinds of solutions. I guess it comes up occasionally but it isn’t so common. We generally also do not support things like workstations due to the fact they can be temperamental and aren’t as strictly controlled as deployment servers are. It is a bit more out of the box use than we would have suggested for the feature but will definitely help you in this situation.

All that being said I might keep an eye out for similar requests so we can add it to our blog or documentation.

Thanks for the suggestion!
Vanessa