Tentacles: How to switch from polling to listening?

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1

We want to switch our polling tentacle to listening. But the dropdown for that is disabled (without given reasons).
How do you that while preserving setup variable scopes etc.?

Regards,
Jakob

2

Hi Jakob,

Thanks for reaching out. I’m afraid this is not possible as they are basically 2 different Tentacle instances. You’re gonna have to delete the Polling instance and then create a new Listening one. This will implicate deleting the Polling Tentacle from Octopus, which will deprecated the Tentacle ID, deleting all references of it from variable scopes. Once you have the new Listening instance, you’re gonna have to re-configure the variables.

Sorry its not the answer you were looking for.

Dalmiro

3

Thanks for the fast answer. Well, do you plan for some kind of “migration” or some feature to cope with this? I think, i might not the only one who will cope with this.

Even if i wanted to do as you proposed, there is also the issue, that i dont know in which places a tentacle is referenced. I would have to go through every project and check references. This is cumbersome and error-prone.

Jakob

P.S.: At least the UI should indicate, why it is not possible. Or just remove the dropdown for good.

4

Hi Jakob,

I realize I wasn’t too clear with the following sentence: This will implicate deleting the Polling Tentacle from Octopus, which will deprecated the Tentacle ID, deleting all references of it from variable scopes. . This will all happen automatically as soon as you delete the Tentacle from the web UI by going to Environments -> [Your machine] -> Delete. When you delete a resource from Octopus (in this case a Tentacle), all references to it are also deleted automatically.

This is actually as design and we do not have immediate planes to add support for this kind of “conversion”. Changing a Tentacle from Listening to Polling is in most cases a big deal, as it implicates changes on ports, firewalls, the use a Username/Password instead of a Thumprint and different app/log paths among other stuff. For this reasons Octopus forces you to create a new instance of the Tentacle if you want to switch from one communication style to another.

If we removed the dropdown, It’ll be harder for the user to realize which communication style is being used at the moment. The would have to figure it out by looking at the available fields and the Tentacle icon, and that’s wouldn’t be a very good user experience. I agree though that we could indicate why the dropdown can’t be modified in the UI. I’ve logged a github issue for this: https://github.com/OctopusDeploy/Issues/issues/2127

Regards,

Dalmiro.