Introduction to the XL Deploy File plugin

In many cases, an application depends on external resources for its configuration. The application accesses these resources from a predefined location or using a predefined mechanism. In the simplest of forms, a resource can be described as a file, an archive (ZIP), or a folder (collection of files).

The XL Deploy File plugin allows you to define these resources in a deployment package and manage them on a target host. It can deploy a file.File, file.Folder, or file.Archive configuration item (CI) on an overthere.Host CI.

The file, folder, or archive can contain placeholders that the plugin will replace when targeting to the specific host, thus allowing resources to be defined independent of their environment.

Features

  • Deploy a file-based resource on a host
  • Upgrade a file-based resource on a host
  • Undeploy a file-based resource on a host

Use in deployment packages

This is a sample deployment package (DAR) manifest that defines a file, folder, and archive resource:

<udm.DeploymentPackage version="1.0" application="FilePluginSample">
    <file.File name="sampleFile" file="sampleFile.txt"/>
    <file.Archive name="sampleArchive" file="sampleArchive.zip" />
    <file.Folder name="sampleFolder" file="sampleFolder" />
</udm.DeploymentPackage>

Customizing copy behavior

If the location on the host where the file, folder, or archive will be copied (the targetPath) is shared with other resources, you can set the targetPathShared property on the relevant CI type to “true”. This means that XL Deploy will not delete the target path when updating or undeploying a deployed application; XL Deploy will only delete the artifacts that were copied to the target path.

For example, suppose you have a shared directory called SharedDir, which contains a directory that was not created by XL Deploy called MyDir. If targetPathShared is set to “true”, then XL Deploy will not delete /SharedDir/MyDir/ when updating or undeploying a deployed application. If targetPathShared is set to “false”, XL Deploy will delete /SharedDir/MyDir/.

If /SharedDir/MyDir/ exists and XL Deploy will deploy a folder named MyDir, then XL Deploy will not delete /SharedDir/MyDir/ during the initial deployment (though files with the same name will be overwritten). However, XL Deploy would delete /SharedDir/MyDir/ during an update or undeployment.

You can also customize the copy commands that the Remoting plugin uses for files and directories; refer to the Overthere connection options for more information.