Accessing AppVeyor Project Environment Variables during manual deploy

Question

I'm new to AppVeyor, I work for a web agency where we have many projects in separate GIT repos.

Each project has a development branch which is what I'm watching in AppVeyor. Since we have a single internal development server running IIS, it was a good candidate to define our development server as an AppVeyor Environment. The development server is running the AppVeyor Agent.

Inside the project specific YAML files I'm specifying the environment name and a custom environment variable which I've defined.

environment:
  iis_site_name: project-specific-site-name.com

deploy:
- provider: Environment
  name: dev-environment

I've configured the AppVeyor environment to accept the environment variable from the project like this.

AppVeyor Environment - Note: websitebuild is the "deploy name" associated with the artifact.

This work's perfectly on a commit, the project is built and deployed to the Agent in the correct location.

Where this is not working is when I need to kick off a manual deploy. So lets say I want to kick off a manual deploy by going into the AppVeyor interface and selecting Environments > Dev Environment > New Deploy > Select Project

When this deploy runs the environment variable from the YAML file (iis_site_name) is not seen and a new IIS site named 'default' is created and the site is deployed there. Note that I have also tried adding the environment variable in the project settings via the GUI (as opposed to in the YAML) and it behaves no differently.

Answer 1

I believe it is expected behavior, when build-time environment variables are not available, Appveyor will send to agent default value which you define at Environment level variables. Please look here

At the bottom of that screen we are defining its “default” value, i.e. the value used when you deploy from Environments and build environment variables are not present

As I understand this does not fit your scenario, because you need different site name for different projects. What you can do is to create separate Environment for every project (with separate default site names), but replace all their environment access keys with the same you use for you current environment, thus agent will pick up jobs from all of them.

Update:

This is not best solution according to Marty’s comments. Lets use REST API then.

Documentation is here https://www.appveyor.com/docs/api/environments-deployments/#start-deployment

Check sample PowerShell function below. You can just call it with project-specific parameters when needed.

Note that you also have to set websitebuild.hostname to $(iis_site_name) in Deployment provider setting for sites use host header instead of * bindings on IIS, otherwise they will fight over the TCP port ;)

function start-appveyorDeploy
{
    param (
        [Parameter(Position=0, Mandatory=$true)]
        [string]$projectSlug,

        [Parameter(Position=1, Mandatory=$true)]
        [string]$buildVersion,

        [Parameter(Position=2, Mandatory=$true)]
        [string]$siteName
    )   

    $apiUrl = 'https://ci.appveyor.com/api' 

    # Replace this with your values
    $token = <your_token>
    $environmentName = <your_environmentName>
    $accountName = <your_accountName>

    $headers = @{
      "Authorization" = "Bearer $token"
      "Content-type" = "application/json"
    }

    $body = @{
        environmentName=$environmentName
        accountName=$accountName
        projectSlug=$projectSlug
        buildVersion=$buildVersion
        environmentVariables =@{
            iis_site_name=$siteName
        }
    }

    $jsonBody = $body | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 3

    Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$apiUrl/deployments" -Headers $headers -Body $jsonBody  -Method Post
}