TFS 2017 How to rollback a release

Question

Has anyone has a robust way to rollback if a release fails? The methods mentioned in this article doesn't sound very practical: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2016/03/28/implement-rollback-with-release-management-for-tfs-2015/

IBM UrbanCode Deploy can choose to redeploy the previous successful deployment w/o any user intervention: https://developer.ibm.com/urbancode/videos/rollback-scenarios-in-ibm-urbancode-deploy/

Can we have that in TFS?

Answer 1

Once you install the Release Management Utility Tasks extension in your account, you’ll see a task called “Rollback powershell” in the task catalog. For rollback, you just need to add this task to the release definition and mark it “always run”.

An example to access the task execution information is as follows.

try
{

$jsonobject = ConvertFrom-Json $env:Release_Tasks

}
catch
{

Write-Verbose -Verbose “Error parsing Release_Tasks environment variable”
Write-Verbose -Verbose $Error

}

foreach ($task in $jsonobject | Get-Member -MemberType NoteProperty)
{

$taskproperty = $jsonobject.$($task.Name) | ConvertFrom-Json
Write-Verbose -Verbose “Task $($taskproperty.Name) with rank $($task.Name) has status $($taskproperty.Status)”
// Perform rollback action required in case $task.Name has status failed

}

Please notice, you may need to update the api version. Check the case below:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/expression/en-US/aacab4c3-b25b-4348-90b1-4d5661d9d148/release-management-utility-tasks-rollback-task-is-not-working-in-tfs-2017-update-1?forum=tfsbuild