Variables - Deployment Manager

As you promote your application through test, UAT, staging and production, there are going to be differences in:

Database connection strings
Application settings
Web service URL's
Many other parameters

To make it easy to support different environments without hard-coding these configuration values, the Deployment Manager web interface allows you to create variables.

These variables are used during your application deployment. For example, variables you define will be automatically substituted into XML configuration files, and made available to your PowerShell scripts. This allows you to create applications and deployment scripts that are agnostic of the target environment.

Escaping

Note that the value of a variable should be the unescaped version. Quotes and other characters that would normally need to be escaped in XML should not be escaped in the Deployment Manager UI. This is because they will be escaped when injected, and doing so could result in double escaping.

Scoping

A variable can be 'scoped' to zero or one of each of the following:

An environment (most common)
A specific machine
A specific package

For example, suppose these variables exist:

Name	Value	Environment	Machine	Package
LogLevel	Info
LogLevel	Warn	Production
DBConnectionString	Server=SQL-UAT1;Database=...	UAT
DBConnectionString	Server=SQL-PROD;Database=...	Production

During deployment, Deployment Manager will try to select the most specifically scoped variable that applies. For example, when deploying to Production, the LogLevel property would be Warn. But to any other environment, it would fall back to the less-specific variable and have a value of Info instead.

Predefined variables

Deployment Manager automatically makes a number of common useful variables available during each deployment. All predefined variables have a RedGate prefix. The available predefined variables are:

Name	Example value	Description
RedGateEnvironmentName	Production	The name of the environment that was selected when this deployment was scheduled.
RedGateMachineName	ProdServer01	The name assigned to the machine in the Deployment Manager Environments page in the web interface. May or may not be the hostname of the actual machine.
RedGateReleaseNumber	1.9	The release number entered when this release was created in the Deployment Manager web interface.
RedGatePackageName	AcmeCorp.Web	The name of the NuGet package being deployed.
RedGatePackageVersion	1.9.3	The version number of the NuGet package.
RedGatePackageNameAndVersion	AcmeCorp.Web.1.9.3	The name and version number of the NuGet package.
RedGateProjectName	ACME Website	The name of the current project, as defined in the Deployment Manager web interface.
RedGateTaskId	157	An integer used to identity the current task in Deployment Manager. You can use this if you need to record something unique about each deployment.

The following additional variables don't have a default value, but can be set by you to override Deployment Manager behavior:

Name	Example value	Description
RedGatePackageDirectoryPath	C:\MyApp	A custom path that you can tell an Agent to extract your package to. If not set, it will have the value that an Agent extracted the NuGet package to.
RedGatePurgePackageDirectoryBeforeCopy	False	If using `RedGatePackageDirectoryPath`, set this variable to True to clean the target directory before copying.
RedGateWebSiteName	MySite or MySite/MyVDir	Override the IIS site, or use a forward slash to specify a virtual directory, if you want to customise the site/virtual directory used by the IIS convention.
RedGateNotAWebSite	True	Set to True to tell an Agent to skip the IIS convention (i.e., don't configure any IIS sites).

Database variables

When you are deploying databases, you can specify the following variables:

Name	Example value	Description
databaseServer	localhost	The database server you want to deploy to.
databaseName	WidgetShopStaging	The database you want to deploy to.
databaseIntegratedAuthentication	True	If you want to use SQL Server authentication to connect to the SQL Server, specify the value True. If you use SQL Server authentication, you do not need to specify a username and password.
databaseUsername	user	The username for the database you want to deploy to.
databasePassword	password	The password for the database you want to deploy to.
mode	upgrade or createnew	The type of upgrade you want Deployment Manager to perform. You can specify either upgrade if you want to upgrade the database, or createnew if you want to drop and recreate the database.
allowDynamicDatabaseUpgrade	True	If you want Deployment Manager to perform a dynamic database upgrade, specify True. See: How Deployment Manager upgrades databases.
allowPreDeployDatabaseValidation	True	If you want Deployment Manager to validate the upgrade before deployment, specify True. See: Deployment validation.
allowPostDeployDatabaseValidation	True	If you want Deployment Manager to validate the upgrade after deployment, specify True. See: Deployment validation.
abortOnHighSeverityWarnings	True	If you want Deployment Manager to cancel a deployment if there are any serious deployment warnings, specify True.