How to: “warm up” an environment using PowerShell and TeamCity

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Prior to running some tests on a .NET web application, we wanted to send a request to the environment to “warm it up” – so that the initial start of the application pool would be completed before the tests started running.

Solution

  • Select a URL that you can reasonably expect to hit as a smoke test
  • Create a TeamCity build configuration
  • Add a build step to the configuration of type “Powershell Script”
  • Select an in-line script
  • Add the following powershell:
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri http://theURLToHit -UseDefaultCredentials

Now the build step will hit the URI using the build agent’s credentials, and the command will return when the result does (with a 200 after the app pool has started up).

Happy deployments!

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