Tentacles (or alternatives) for Octopus cloud?

Legacy Hosted
1

In our current environment running on a VM I have installed a tentacle on the same machine as Octopus is running on.

The release process contains a step where it unzips a package to the tentacle and then runs an executable from that package.

What is the recommended way to achieve the same thing in Octopus cloud?

2

Hi Tijs,

Thanks for getting in touch! Working with Tentacles in Octopus Cloud should be exactly the same experience as you’ve had previously with self-hosted Octopus - with the exception that the Tentacle will be running separately from Octopus itself. It would work sort of like this:

  1. You set up Tentacle on your VM, in either listening or polling mode (polling tends to work best in Cloud)
  2. Your project in Octopus uses the “Deploy a Package” step to transfer your package to the Tentacle and unzip it
  3. You can then use a “Run a Script” step (or similar) to run a command to invoke your executable on the Tentacle machine

Hopefully that makes sense - let me know if you get stuck and I can assist further :).

Thanks,
Andy

3

Thanks. Sorry for being unclear here - but our only reason for moving to the cloud would be to get rid of the VM so I’m looking for a way to achieve the same without the need for one.

4

Hey Tijs,

Ooh OK that makes more sense, sorry for the confusion!

This is definitely possible: you would use the Deploy a Package step running on the server itself, to some known path like C:\MyPackage, then use a Run a Script step to invoke your exe from C:\MyPackage\meow.exe.

One big caveat here: this is fine if the exe is related to your deployment process; but if your exe is some running app or service, you shouldn’t be running it out of the Octopus Cloud instance. I suspect that would be a violation of our acceptable usage policy, but more importantly, if we have to replace the underlying VM for any reason your app would stop running. So it wouldn’t be reliable for hosting anything out of.

Hopefully this all makes sense!

5

Oh that’s possible? That would be awesome! It’s a small executable that runs our database migration scripts so I’m assuming it would be fine to run. Thanks!