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Prevent unnecessary artifact loading when using version control

I am using TFS 2015 Update 2 Release Management (ie, the “Vacation” tab), and I have my build, which places the desired result in a folder to place the files. It looks something like this:

/Drop --> /App 1 --> /App 2 --> /App 3

My release definition has a Powershell task to deploy each application. This works fine, and since each of the specified applications (App 1, App 2, App 3) is defined as their own artifacts, I get a good choice of path when I open the Related artifacts dialog when searching for a powershell script to execute.

The problem is that VSOAgent is deploying to this deployment server, it downloads ALL related artifacts for the entire release definition - regardless of whether they are used. Therefore, if I have one Powershell task referencing application 1, I also download application 2 and application 3.

In my case, my build leads to dozens of artifacts, only maybe 20% of them are deployed in any given environment. Therefore, I load a TON that I do not need. In fact, this means something that should take (and accept the DID in the old version control), perhaps in 5 minutes it only takes 20 minutes to load the artifacts.

Is there any way to prevent this?

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3 answers

Release control loads all artifacts published by the assembly definition that you selected by default. There are currently no settings to configure. You can send feature request to VSTS User Voice .

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I don’t know if it is available in TFS 2015 Update 2 Release Management, since we have already switched to Update 3, but with Update 3 you can set it at the environment level.

  • In the environment definition, click elipsis (...)
  • Select the menu item "Configure Variables ..."
  • In the dialog box, select the General tab
  • Toggle Skip Artifact Search

I do not have access to TFS 2015 Update 2, so you have to try. Once you do this, you can add tasks to manually copy the necessary file artifacts.

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There is currently an extension for VSTS and on-prem TFS that solves the problem: https://github.com/chamindac/vsts.release.task.download-artifacts

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