Making a Web Request After an AppVeyor Deployment to Start an Application

Update October 17, 2017

This doesn’t work with environment deployments, as this needs to run after the deployment has completed. See http://help.appveyor.com/discussions/questions/8741-more-info-on-after_deploy for more information.

For ASP.NET applications it can be useful to make a request to an application immediately after deployment to bring the application online. When using AppVeyor for push deployments, we can run this directly from AppVeyor!

Add the following to your appveyor.yml file:

after_deploy:
  - ps: |
      if ($ENV:APPVEYOR_REPO_BRANCH -eq "master")
      {
        iex "curl https://production.example.org"
      }
      elseif ($ENV:APPVEYOR_REPO_BRANCH -eq "development")
      {
        iex "curl https://qa.example.org"
      }

If your users are lucky, AppVeyor will pay the start-up cost penalty a real human would normally experience. If luck is unacceptable, you may consider using a staging slot and only switch to production once your application is fully warmed up.