Octopus is an automated release management server for professional .NET developers. Octo.exe is a command line tool for managing your Octpus installation and triggering releases. The tool can be downloaded from the GitHub downloads page.

All commands take the form of:

octo command [<options>]

You can get help using:

octo help [command]

Assuming you have a project named HelloWorld:

octo create-release --server=http://your-octopus/api --project=HelloWorld

This will create a new release of the HelloWorld project using the latest available NuGet packages for each step in the project. The version number of the release will be the highest NuGet package version. You can override this using:

octo create-release --server=http://your-octopus/api --project=HelloWorld --version=1.0.3

To create a release and deploy it to an environment named Production:

octo create-release --server=http://your-octopus/api --project=HelloWorld --deployto=Production

Note that packages that have already been deployed to the selected machines will not be re-deployed. You can force them to be re-deployed using the --force argument:

octo create-release --server=http://your-octopus/api --project=HelloWorld --deployto=Production --force

If your IIS server is set up to require Windows Authentication, the tool will automatically pass the currently logged in user's credentials. If this doesn't work, or you want to use a different user, simply add these two arguments:

octo ... --user=fred --pass=secret