Run Web Application Deployment in TeamCity – Only on Weekdays

by Oliver 26. May 2016 22:12

We've experienced in the past that deploying new features before the weekend is not a good idea because potential bugs are not discovered in a timely manner and our reaction times to critical problems are also longer over the weekend than during the week.

So for a couple of years now, we've stuck to our no-deployments-on-weekends policy, and every once in a while an exceptional deployment with either some "very important" new feature or "only small changes, nothing big" reminded us that it was really a good idea to deploy only on weekdays.

There was one downside to this: we always missed out on getting fresh bits on our servers on Monday morning because someone had to trigger the deployment by doing a push to a dedicated Git repository before our TeamCity deployment configuration started to run at 2:20 am. Most of us usually don't work on Sundays so there usually was no-one to do that.

Using a CRON expression in your trigger

It turns out, TeamCity supports date/time triggers defined by a CRON expression:

Screenshot-20160521-220234

Since I don't use cron on a daily basis and don't speak cron fluently, I was glad to stumble upon Cron Maker which was a great help with getting the syntax right:

Screenshot-20160521-214557

Having a tool like this in my tool chain makes me confident and I won't avoid using CRON or its powerful expressions in the future!

Happy cron'ing!

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About Oliver

shades-of-orange.com code blog logo I build web applications using ASP.NET and have a passion for javascript. Enjoy MVC 4 and Orchard CMS, and I do TDD whenever I can. I like clean code. Love to spend time with my wife and our children. My profile on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

About Anton

shades-of-orange.com code blog logo I'm a software developer at teamaton. I code in C# and work with MVC, Orchard, SpecFlow, Coypu and NHibernate. I enjoy beach volleyball, board games and Coke.