Very first installation of a Tentacle does not prompt the 'Getting Started' screen of Tentacle Manager

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1

Hello,

It seems installing 2.4.10.235 for the very first time on a machine, I’m not getting prompted with the ‘Getting Started’ screen of the Tentacle Manager after the msi completes. Instead, it installs a default configured tentacle. I then must delete the instance and create a new one, which allows me to go through the configuration steps. I uninstalled Octopus Tentacle and try it again and I’m correctly taking to the ‘getting started’ screen after the .msi is done. To replicate, this would need to be tested on a clean machine. Is there a way around this?

Thanks,
Ben

2

Hi Ben,

Thanks for getting in touch! Could it be possible that someone else had started an Octopus Tentacle installation on the server that you are referring to?
Honestly our installer isn’t smart enough to do what you have stated. If it doesn’t go through the Getting Started process it does nothing. Nothing happens before this to even create a default configuration, it all happens at the end.

Vanessa

3

Hey Vanessa,

There were not any other octopus installations happening at the time. I have replicated this behavior on multiple servers. I have a video of the install I can share with you tomorrow.

Thanks,
Ben

4

Hi Ben,

Yes please do, I’ll also try to install a fresh VM and replicate.

Vanessa

5

Hi Vanessa,

Please see the attached video.

Ben

InstallTentacle.wmv (467 KB)

6

Hi Ben,

Thanks for getting in touch.

There are two parts to the Octopus setup:

  1. The MSI. It is very, very dumb, it just puts files on the disk, and adds a couple of registry entries and shortcuts.
  2. The Tentacle Manager tool. It searches for an existing installation and Windows Service, and if not found shows the getting started wizard.

Conversely, when uninstalling, the MSI doesn’t get any smarter - it just deletes binaries from disk. It doesn’t remove the Windows Service, or delete the old configuration files (C:\Octopus in your screenshot). That’s because sometimes people need to uninstall and keep the existing settings for a future install.

My guess would be that someone installed Tentacle on this machine and configured it before. They may have then uninstalled the MSI, but as described above it makes no difference - Tentacle is still “configured” even though the MSI isn’t installed.

If you set up a fresh machine, you can check:

  1. Are there files under C:\Octopus?
  2. In services.msc, is there an OctopusDeploy Tentacle windows service?

Hope this helps,

Paul

7

Hey Paul,

You are correct about a clean machine. I guess my other machines must have had some remnants from a previous install. Sorry about that.

Thanks,
Ben