Deployment

• Overview
• Environment variables in provider settings
• Pull Requests
• Conditional deployment
• Deploy on tag (GitHub and GitLab only)

Overview

The fact that AppVeyor deployment requires build artifacts on input makes the deployment process predictable and repeatable.

AppVeyor allows you to deploy using multiple providers as part of the build process (inline deployment) as well as promote builds to existing environments (environment deployment).

Inline deployment runs as the last phase in the build pipeline and allows the configuration of multiple deployments running synchronously one-by-one with results in the build console.

Environment deployment is triggered manually or through the API to deploy a “green” build to an existing environment. A new deployment is registered within a project/environment with results in the deployment console. If you don’t have any existing environments, you can create one at https://ci.appveyor.com/environments.

The table below summarizes the key differences between the two modes with lists of deployment providers available in each mode:

Environment variables in provider settings

You can use standard and custom environment variables in provider settings, for example you can set a remote FTP folder as $(APPVEYOR_BUILD_VERSION)\artifacts where $(APPVEYOR_BUILD_VERSION) will be replaced with the current build version.

Pull Requests

Deployments, before_deploy and after_deploy scripts are disabled by default on Pull Requests. Deployments on Pull Requests can be enabled with Enable deployments in Pull Requests UI-only checkbox in the General project settings tab.

Conditional deployment

When you deploy as part of the build process you can control the conditions under which a deployment should be run.

By default, AppVeyor deploys from all branches, but you can include only specific branches. Also, you can use any environment variables to have more complex conditions.

For example, to deploy from the “master” branch and only artifacts built for the “x86” platform (platform is the name of an environment variable):

- provider: Environment
  name: production
  on:
    branch: master
    platform: x86

Deploy on tag (GitHub and GitLab only)

By default AppVeyor starts a new build on any push to GitHub, whether it’s a regular commit or a new tag. Repository tagging is frequently used to trigger deployment.

AppVeyor sets the APPVEYOR_REPO_TAG environment variable to distinguish regular commits from tags - the value is true if the tag was pushed; otherwise it’s false. When it’s true the name of the tag is stored in APPVEYOR_REPO_TAG_NAME.

You can use the APPVEYOR_REPO_TAG variable to trigger deployment on tag only, for example:

- provider: Environment
  name: production
  on:
    APPVEYOR_REPO_TAG: true # keep casing this way for Linux builds where variables are case-sensitive

However, please note that in case of annotated tag, branch and APPVEYOR_REPO_TAG are mutually exclusive. This is because, for webhook created as a result of annotated tag, there is no practical reliable way to recognize what branch the tag was created from. Therefore with this setting deployment will happen only for the master branch:

- provider: Environment
  name: production
  on:
    branch: master # only this will work
    APPVEYOR_REPO_TAG: true # condition will never be evaluated for annotated tag

So if you need to deploy on both branch and annotated tags, please create two provider sections under deploy like this:

deploy:
  - provider: Environment
    name: production
    on:
      branch: master

  - provider: Environment
    name: production
    on:
      APPVEYOR_REPO_TAG: true

You can disable builds on new tags through the UI (General tab of project settings) or in appveyor.yml:

skip_tags: true