I’m evaluating Octopus Deploy for possible purchase. We’re currently running TeamCity (and now Octopus) on a server in our office and deploying to a remote data center. Our current process is pretty well automated, but one pain point we’re trying to solve is the time it takes to deploy a release. Our “app” consists of 4 ASP.NET MVC web apps and one Windows service. The slowness in our current process comes from zipping/FTPing/unzipping the build artifacts. The single zip file is currently about 25MB, and the majority of its bulk comes from shared DLLs, mostly 3rd-party libs from NuGet, resulting in 5 bin folders that are over 90% the same. It would be really great if we could somehow package/transfer/unpackage those shared DLLs once and have the deployment process be smart enough to reconstitute the bin folders on the production server.
I’ve been thinking about a custom solution but thought I’d look into Octopus first. So far it appears we’ve taken a step backwards in that the 5 NuGet packages output by TeamCity total about 60MB. I see that Octopus does not support NuGet dependencies so I don’t think there’s a way to leverage that. Are you aware of any other way to solve this? If it makes a difference, a release will always involve deploying all 5 packages. Thanks.