Our application consists of a number of interrelated websites and services. We would like to run the “production” version of the applications that aren’t being actively worked on. My first thought was to have a tentacle on each dev machine that deploys to IIS, however I don’t want to have all the dev machines appearing in the web portal. Is it possible to have a tentacle that doesn’t appear in the machine list? Can the machine be dynamically added and removed? Is there another approach that I should be looking at for deploying apps via Octopus on a dev machine?
Thanks for your questions. If I understand correctly you are deploying your application to the dev machines but are concerned about showing all the dev machines on the portal?
It is not possible to have a Tentacle that doesn’t appear on the machine list, however you can use permissions to limit visibility. You could have a dev machine per environment and limit the user to just that environment. The user would not be able to see the machines in any other environment.
It is possible to dynamically add and remove machines through the Octopus Server API. You can find API documentation for machines here. So yes, you could add a machine, deploy to it and then remove it when the deployment is done.
I would suggest the permissions route is much simpler but happy to provide more help with whatever path you choose.
Thanks for the quick response. Is the user visibility scripted as well? That way each user could have a script that would add their machine to Octopus, then set the visibility to them only.
Yes, anything that can be done in Octopus can be scripted through the API. So if you wanted to create an environment, set the permissions and then add a machine to that environment it can all be automated.