Server Object Extensions (SOEs) can be incredibly powerful, but they can also be a pain to debug.

Typical workflow:

1. Rebuild solution
   
2. Open ArcGIS Manager in browser -> Site -> Extensions -> Update Extension by selecting .soe file.
3. Restart all of the services that depended on the SOE.
   
4. Attach Visual Studio to process.
   

Steps 2 & 3 are the really annoying ones, but they can be automated!

It turns out this is really a post about REST and Python.

When you update an SOE through the ArcGIS Manager app (http://localhost/arcgis/manager), the web application is actually making calls to ArcGIS Server REST admin endpoints.

Automate with Python

I’ll cut to the chase.

See the full script here:
https://github.com/jwerts/soe-updater

Usage (simply run from command line after rebuilding SOE solution):

C:\Projects\_General\_Code\soe-updater>python update_soe.py

Retrieving token...
Retrieved: oUK04q-J8ORWDUrSWGPfq8zAU29u3q5_YZ79ZvcFZx8kFneOMb5Z2Y2Yf19
Uploading SOE...
Uploaded: ibd792bae-a986-4861-8ac3-c16d42f4d610
Updating SOE...
Updated!
Starting services...
Starting service_folder/service.MapServer
Started!

Your SOE will be updated and services restarted. You can re-attach to the service processes or if you’re using System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch(); in your Init() function, you’ll automatically be greeted with the dialog to attach your process once the script finishes and the services restart.

Now a little explanation of what’s going on…

REST API Calls

Generate token

Because we’re going to automate this, we need a preliminary step. We’ll generate a token that can be passed to subsequent steps.

http://localhost/arcgis/rest/tokens

Upload the SOE

The .soe file that gets generated after building in Visual Studio is uploaded to ArcGIS Server and returns an itemID.

http://localhost/arcgis/admin/uploads/upload

Update the SOE

Another call references the uploaded .soe through the itemID and updates the extension.

http://localhost/arcgis/admin/services/types/extensions/update

Restart services

After the SOE is updated, all services that use it are stopped and must be restarted. This can also be accomplished through REST calls:

http://localhost/arcgis/admin/services/[service_folder]/[service_name]/start

These calls are all pretty straightford to automate in a Python script using the requests library (http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/).