Octopus Deploy Documentation

Deployment targets

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With Octopus Deploy, you can deploy software to Windows servers, Linux servers, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Kubernetes clusters, cloud regions, or an offline package drop. Regardless of where you're deploying your software, these machines and services are known as your deployment targets.

You can manage your deployment targets by navigating to Infrastructure ➜ Deployment Targets in the Octopus Web Portal:

The deployment targets area of Octopus Deploy

From the Deployment Targets tab you can add new deployment targets, disable or delete deployment targets, check on the status of your targets, and run health checks.

Adding deployment targets

Deployment targets are added in different ways, depending on the type of target you are adding and how the target will communicate with the Octopus Server. For instructions, see:

Accounts

In addition to the deployment targets above, you may also need to configure accounts to use in conjunction with your infrastructure during your deployments.

You can configure the following accounts:

Target roles

Before you can deploy software your deployment targets, you need to tag them with target roles. This ensures you deploy the right software to the right deployment targets. Typical target roles include:

  • web-server
  • app-server
  • db-server

Using target roles means the infrastructure in each of your environments doesn't need to be identical. For instance, in the test environment, you might be using a single VM to test all of your software, and so you tag that VM with all of the target roles you use in your deployment process. However, in the production environment you might have one or more dedicated deployment targets per functional role, for instance, one deployment target for the database server which you would tag with the target role db-server, and another deployment target that performs the role of web server and is tagged with the target role web-server.

Deployment targets can have more than one role, more than one deployment target can have the same role, and each deployment target must have at least one role.

Try to name the target roles based on the function the deployment targets will serve rather than describing some attribute of the deployment targets.

Add target roles

Roles are created and saved in the database as soon as you assign them to a deployment target.

Decide on the naming convention you will use before creating your first target role as it's not possible to change the case after the role has been created, for instance, all lowercase to camel case.

  1. Register a deployment target or click on an already registered deployment target and go to Settings.
  2. In the Target Roles field, enter the target role you'd like to use (no spaces).
  3. Save the target settings.

The role has been created and assigned to the deployment target and can be added to other deployment targets.

You can check all the roles assigned to your deployment targets from the Infrastructure tab.

Dynamic infrastructure

You can use scripts to create Azure Service Principal Accounts, Azure Web Apps, Azure Service Fabric, Azure Cloud Services and Kubernetes targets.

Learn about Managing resources with scripts.

Learn more

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