Controlling Octopus Releases with VSTS Release Management

You may be using Octopus deploy for your deployment automation pipeline needs while you are having your builds and work items managed in VSTS. It is a good idea to manage the Octopus release pipeline via VSTS release management so that you have the opportunity to use automated test execution and capturing of test results, as well as easily generate release notes using the VSTS work items, using feature rich tasks and automation test results views in VSTS release management. Let’s look at the important steps required to make VSTS release management to successfully utilize your existing Octopus deploy process steps.

Integrating VSTS Package Feed to Octopus

Octopus deploy is used by many organizations as their continuous deployment tool. You can send a package to Octopus deploy server via VSTS build or release step, using  “Push Packages to Octopus” task comes with VSTS Marketplace extension named Octopus integration. However, if you prefer to use VSTS Package Management to store your packages, you can now consume them in Octopus by integrating with the VSTS Package Management feed. Let’s look at how to setup Octopus to consume VSTS Package Management feed packages. (We have discussed how to use VSTS Package Management feed as artifact source in VSTS Release Management in a previous post “Using NuGet Packages as VSTS Release Artifact Source”)