The Tentacle installer consists of two parts:
- An MSI, which installs the files to C:\Program Files
- A configuration tool, which installs the Windows Service, sets up the trust relationship, lets you configure port numbers, and so on
The configuration tool is separate because it can be re-run at any time, similar to the way SQL Server Reporting Services is installed via the MSI, but then later configured through the Reporting Services Configuration Manager.
MSI's can easily be deployed via Group Policy or other enterprise software installation tools, but the configuration tool is a GUI, and had to be run manually.
In the Octopus chat room, justFen_ suggested that it should be possible to perform an installation of Tentacle completely unattended. From release 1.0.19.1298 onwards, that is now possible. Configuring Tentacle consists of a couple of commands, which I will walk through.
Update: the documentation for this feature has been moved to the documentation page.
Last night I spoke to a customer that has over a hundred Tentacles, each of which had been painstakingly installed manually. Although I suspect people will still use the GUI installer when installing a handful of Tentacle servers, I think this feature will be very handy when it comes to managing large numbers of deployment agents.
