Share VM Environment with multiple DevOps projects

[wbosland]

Hi,

I created a VM Environment in my DevOps Project that I use in a multi-stage YAML pipeline to deploy a Web API to IIS. Is it possible to share that same VM Environment with other DevOps Projects so they can use the same agent to deploy their Web APIs?

[#2]

I've got the same use case - out of interest, what did you end up doing?

[#3]

I ended up creating a VM Environment for each DevOps Project and install those as separate agents on the same server. If you want to do this as well, make sure you use a different environment name for each project.
The reason for this is when you install the agent as a Windows service using Powershell, the environment name is used in the name of the service.
So if you use the same environment name, the installation will fail because a Windows service with that name already exists.
To make sure these conflicts never occur, I used this naming convention: <project name>-<environment name>

[#4]

@wbosland Thanks for the info, and for the heads up about the environment name, much appreciated.

Shame that MSFT don't allow you to set up a single environment and use it across projects. One of our servers has 20ish IIS sites on it for testing various web apps. That's gonna be a lot of agents!

[#5]

@dalemac89 

No problem. There is another thread about this from 2020, so this has been a problem for a while now unfortunately.

By the way, I wrote an article on how to build and deploy a web api to IIS using a multi-stage pipeline. You can almost copy paste the YAML code to get it working, you only have to change some names and paths.

[#6]

Cheers, that looks helpful - hadn't previously seen the task for stopping the IIS service (which no doubt we would need for production as .NET core is awful for locking the dll files up).