Automated deployment options for SSRS

Question

I have been tasked to look into ways to automate the deployment process for our SSRS 2012 reports. Are there any good tools out there? I'm thinking of something along the lines of press a button and the report gets deployed.

Thanks!

Answer 1

To deploy our SSRS reports, we're using this lovely powershell project:

https://github.com/timabell/ssrs-powershell-deploy

Usage:

.\Deploy-SSRSProject.ps1 -path YourReportsProject.rptproj -configuration Release -verbose

or you can use the alternate parameter set:

.\Deploy-SSRSProject\Deploy-SSRSProject.ps1 -path .\AFS.Reports.rptproj -ServerUrl http://localhost/Reportserver -Folder MyReports -DataSourceFolder "MyReports/Data Sources" -DataSetFolder "MyReports/Datasets" -verbose

The full deployment story (for us):

• ssrs-powershell-deploy scripts, .rptproj, .rds, .rdl files are all packaged into a nuget package by our build server.
• Octopus Deploy extracts the nuget package on our SSRS server and calls Deploy-SSRSProject.ps1

Answer 2

Visual Studio Deployment

Visual Studio is actually really good at automatic deployment. I've used it a number of times with great results. You need to split your solution into separate projects for each folder on the report server and then it will take a bit of time to configure each project & deployment environment. But after that initial time investment it works wonders and when you add a new project you can simply copy the deployment settings for an existing project.

MSDN article: Set Deployment Properties (Reporting Services)

Rs.exe Utility

Alternatively you can use the Rs.exe utility which comes with SSRS. It is a command-line utility used for automatic deployment and administration. I haven't personally use this one, but I know of it. It is my understanding that there are also third party utilities which leverage Rs.exe in order to automate report deployment but I haven't used any of them so I can't recommend any.

More info on MSDN: RS.exe Utility (SSRS)

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I'm sure there are also other third-party tools you could get but I haven't ever looked into them. I've always found the Visual Studio deployment functionality sufficient for my needs.