Target roles

Target roles are tags assigned to deployment targets that describe what the target is used for — for example web-server, app-server, or db-server. A target can have multiple roles, and the same role can be shared across many targets.

Roles are the mechanism by which a deployment step selects which machines it runs on. Every IIS, script, and HTTP request step has a Target roles field; at deployment time, fDeploy intersects that role list with the release’s target environment and runs the step on each matching target (subject to the step’s execution strategy).

Because targets are filtered by environment + role, the same role can be reused across environments — a web-server role in DEV, TEST, and PROD resolves to different machines depending on which environment the release is being deployed to.

Tip

Keep role names short and descriptive of the machine’s function, not its environment. “Environment” already comes from the release’s target environment — encoding it into the role (prod-web-server) forces you to duplicate deployment steps per environment instead of reusing one step.