Really happy overall with Octopus Deploy. We just have a couple of issues we are trying to resolve. One of which is how to manage (import, export, version control) our variable sets.
I’ve already scanned through past discussions about variable sets and it seems there are many people with similar problems to ours. I understand that we can use Octopus Manager to import and export, but there are a couple of issues with this. Firstly, it looks like Octopus Manager can only run on the server where Octopus is installed. This means having to Remote Desktop to the server in order to manage it. From a security point of view we don’t like this. Secondly, the exported json is not very user friendly. Each entry seems to have a guid created by the server. So if we wanted to add an additional entry and import it I’m not sure how that would work. Additionally there are values like “Environments-1” in there making it unclear as to which environment the variable has scope in.
Are there any upcoming features or additional tools we can use to overcome these issues?
Ideally, it would be great to have an export/import feature built into the web UI. The format of which is straightforward and easy to edit.
Thanks for reaching out! If the import/export feature doesn’t suit your needs, as it requires you to remote into the Octopus server, you could use the Octopus API to make updates to your variable sets based on files that you can checkin to source control.
There’s a cmdlet I wrote for the Octoposh Module called Update-OctopusVariableSet that updates a variable set based on the contents of a JSON file using the API. This file uses the friendly names of the resources (“Development” instead of “Environments-1”) making it more readable for users. The cmdlet can also be used from any computer.
Thank you for your reply. It looks like we can make this work with your Octoposh cmdlets.
It’s not ideal however, since we will need to open up Powershell access from developer workstations. At the very least it would be great to have a json export of variable sets from the web UI. Similar to the json export of step templates.