How to automate publishing .NET web applications - visual-studio

There is a Visual Studio solution that has multiple web application projects. All of them are to be published to a common folder - D:\inetpub\wwwroot\FirstSite.
Each project has a publish profile Local.pubxml which imports settings from a global publishsettings.xml, and I use the One-Click Publish feature to publish each project.
Now, I would like to automate this process, which will Rebuild the solution and on success, publish all the projects to the target folder.
I have managed to create a Console application using C#, which can build all the projects in a solution. But, unfortunately could only go that far, as I'm unable to figure out how to get started about the publishing.
I'm not looking for setting up a build server. Just want to save time publishing projects to local folders.
Can we achieve this in a console application, by passing parameters like 'solution path' & 'target folder path', so that it can work for any such solution with multiple projects.
If not, are there any simple tools for this.

When you invoke msbuild for the solution build, you can pass
/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=Local /p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true
which will publish each project with the Local profile for you

Related

Trigger Visual Studio Publish functionality via command line

I'm tasked to automate the deployment of multiple, related ASP.NET 4.8 projects to Azure WebApps. The solution contains multiple projects, some of which represent virtual applications in the resulting WebApp and get deployed to different sub directories:
Project 1 -> site\wwwroot
Project 2 -> site\app1
Project 3 -> site\app2
etc.
Until now the solution was published using Visual Studios publishing functionality (right-click -> publish) and publishing profiles.
At first I thought that I could easily publish the solution using msbuild from commandline like this:
msbuild project1.csproj /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile="PathToPubxml" /p:Password="SecretPassword"
Several attempts were made to get this to work but either there were errors or the separate projects were deployed to the same directory, I cannot even recall every single error we got trying out all kinds of possible solutions.
The easiest way would be to just execute devenv.exe with some parameter to trigger the publish functionality of Visual Studio that seems to work with this project setup but I couldn't find any commandline parameter to do this yet.
Is there any way to do this?

WebDeployment is not

I am trying to deploy an web application that was created on VB with the .NET Framework 2.0 using the TFS 2017 continuous deploy. It doesn’t have a solution file inside like vbproj or csproj, so I needed to avoid all the suggestions to include extra information on the vbproj.In order to run the MSBuild even locally I need to change in my .sln this tag, so all my compiled code is also there
Debug.AspNetCompiler.TargetPath = "....\PrecompiledWeb\ARB\Debug\"
Unfortunately, I can’t deploy the application using the TFS. So far I tried to deploy it through my Visual Studio project, and is working fine with every option: I tried MSDeploy, Web Deploy Package, and FileSystem, and is working fine from the Visual Studio Publish Option
With that, even my transformation take place.
Now lets say I go to my TFS and I put this parameters on the MSBuild
/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:WebPublishMethod=Package /p:PackageAsASingleFile=true /p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true /p:PackageLocation="\\MyServer\Content"
My files are compiled but never stored in my Content folder. No one of them!!! I can’t figure out what is going on here.
From your screenshot, you are using a Web Site project, not a Web Application project. The output structure of a Web Site project in TFS is different from build in VS (you can see a PrecompiledWeb folder in your build source directory on build agent server). Instead of using MSBuild argument, you can consider add tasks below to copy the files you want to publish:
We strongly suggest you switch from Web Site projects to Web Application projects to avoid these issues.

Visual Studio Publish Profile: Delete specific folder on the server before publishing

Is there a way for a Web Deploy operation to Azure App Services to delete a specific folder on the server before the deployment starts?
I need certain files to be removed on the server when they are removed on the solution and deployment leaves those files intact on the server which is causing issues.
Is there any way to add this to the publishing profile as a pre-publish action?
Just to add more context, this is an ASP.NET project using C#. Sitecore is the CMS.
i have tried to find something specific to the SiteCore and not msbuild BeforePublish target, but it looks like you have two options here:
1) Use msbuild BeforePublish target
2) Use Visual Studio Team Services build Continuous Integration - it will need some additional manual tasks, but nothing serious and it is much more visual than msbuild.
I would highly recommend to try the second option - here, you can specify build steps like Take sources => build => execute some command (here is your place to put something for deleting the files) => publish.

Build not publishing Web API project in Visual Studio Team Services (was VS Online)

I have created a VS build definition on Team Services. The build runs successfully when I queue it and it also outputs the dlls for all the projects in the solution except the service layer which I have created using Web Api2.
when I download the artifacts from the drop location, I have folders holding the dlls for the data layer, the business layer and other helper projects. What I don't have is the main service layer dll which I can deploy to my IIS.
Here is a screenshot of my publish settings.
What could I be missing ?
It seems that you are using the default settings for the build definition. With these settings, the contents for "Copy Files" task is "**\bin\$(BuildConfiguration)**" while web api project does not have buildconfiguration folder. So it cannot find the files for web api project. To copy these files, add one more "Copy Files" task and configure the settings as following:
If you want the deployment files for the project, you need to set you build definition as following:
Add arguments /p:DeployOnBuild=true;OutDir="$(build.artifactstagingdirectory)" for Visual Studio Build step.
Remove Copy Files step.
Set Path to Publish to $(build.artifactstagingdirectory)\\_PublishedWebsites for Publish Build Artifacts step.
Then you should get the deployment files in the drop folder.
Open the Configuration Manager in VisualStudio and ensure the WebAPI project is included for the configuration (Debug, Release, etc) that you are building.

Deploying umbraco with TeamCity

First post on Stack, so please be gentle!
We are just getting into Continuous Integration with TeamCity. We have setup a TeamCity project(s) that looks like so:
Solution Build (builds entire solution) - .Sln file
Debug to Dev Server (builds .csproj in Debug configuration and Deploys to test server using MSDeploy)
Release to Production (builds .csproj in Release configuration and Deploys to production server using MSDeploy)
Within our Umbraco Visual Studio project (which is a Web Application not the standard Website project type) we have the umbraco_client and umbraco folders excluded from the Project, primarily because they are already compiled and don't need to be re-compiled by our process. Both folders are however included in the SVN repo.
The problem we are experiencing is that because these two folders are excluded from the Visual Studio project, TeamCity does not deploy them.
So my question boils down to "how do you include folders in the TeamCity build package where the folders are in the SVN but excluded from the Visual Studio project?".
Any pointers would be really appreciated.
Thanks
dotdev
We've been using TeamCity for umbraco. This is what we've been doing recently on our internal dev servers:
/p:Configuration=Debug
/p:DeployOnBuild=True
/p:DeployTarget=MSDeployPublish
/p:MsDeployServiceUrl=OurDevServer/msdeployagentservice
/p:AllowUntrustedCertificate=True
/p:MSDeployPublishMethod=RemoteAgent
/p:CreatePackageOnPublish=True
/p:DeployIisAppPath=umbraco_site
/p:IgnoreDeployManagedRuntimeVersion=True
/p:FilesToIncludeForPublish=AllFilesInProjectFolder
/p:SkipExtraFilesOnServer=True
/p:ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment="media;App_Data\Logs;App_Data\preview"
/p:IncludeSetAclProviderOnDestination=False
/p:AuthType=NTML /p:UserName=
They key to solving the problem you are having is
/p:FilesToIncludeForPublish=AllFilesInProjectFolder
By default, it is set to something like "AllFilesInProject". Combining FilesToIncludeForPublish with the ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment can give you some control over exactly what TeamCity attempts to deploy
I would suggest using an approach similar to the one described in this blog post: http://blog.iqit.dk/2013/11/using-package-restore-in-umbraco-projects
You don't mention nuget, so assuming you use a zip or web pi to setup Umbraco in your solution, but you should still be able to use the targets listed in msbuild or add to your web applications .csproj when building your solution. It would require that you have the Umbraco and Umbraco_client folders somewhere in Svn repo or on your build server in order to copy it in.
As an alternative I can also recommend that you download the UmbracoCms nuget as that contains an extension to the msdeploy pipeline that includes the two mentioned folders in an msdeploy zip package. But again also based on the nuget install and thus a standard location for the Umbraco folders.
Hope this helps.
I've based my TeamCity builds on Troy Hunt's excellent "You're Deploying it Wrong" series - which is an excellent step by step guide to integrating Visual Studio based projects and TeamCity. http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/11/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity.html
As to excluding the umbraco and umbraco_client folders from SVN; a complex Umbraco build will probably have changes in the Umbraco folder to the default build eg adding Umbraco Event Handlers, adding new Umbraco Sections, changes to back-office tabs. I don't think umbraco_client will change unless you get into changing rich text editors and so on - but it is possible. So I'm not sure that excluding those particular folders is correct. Excluding the media folder is often discussed as well - but it does make TeamCity config simpler if everything is there.
But to answer your question you could exclude them from the build and copy them onto your build server; then add a 'Command Line' runner build step that simply copies them back into place before the build step starts.
I usually add a source control change step that fires a rebuild and have two build steps in TeamCity for an Umbraco project. One is a 'Visual Studio (sln)' runner to check that the sln file has every reference and third party product set up correctly (this should eliminate the 'it works on my machine' issues); and the second is a 'MSBuild' runner that replicates the csproj build process. With the second build step with the right permissions (if your ports are open on the machine you're deploying to, or you're deploying to the same machine as you are on) you could test this in Visual Studio or DOS.
These two build steps should be able to deploy to the IIS website on a staging server; and if the right ports are open on your live or UAT server you could then add a third build step and deploy it onwards (if the first two build steps run properly).

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