How do I set the environment in a Visual Studio generated publish profile - visual-studio

Question

I have 2 publish profiles. I want to make one staging and one production. After browsing a bit I found out you could use the command line publish to set an environment variable: dotnet publish /p:Configuration=Release /p:EnvironmentName=Staging. However my publish profiles are generated by Visual Studio and I was wondering if I could set it in there?

Answer 1

Although I didn't tried this approach on .Net Core, I believe that It will work since It is the feature of VS Publish (msbuild).
you need to create web.config. Something like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<handlers>
<remove name="WebDAV" />
<add name="aspNetCore" path="*" verb="*" modules="AspNetCoreModule" resourceType="Unspecified" />
</handlers>
<modules>
<remove name="WebDAVModule" />
</modules>
<aspNetCore requestTimeout="00:30:00" processPath="%LAUNCHER_PATH%" arguments="%LAUNCHER_ARGS%" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout">
<environmentVariables>
<environmentVariable name="ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT" value="Development" />
</environmentVariables>
</aspNetCore>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>
then you need to add Config Transform for these (see below)
For the config transformation you can check this github documentation: https://github.com/vijayrkn/webconfigtransform/blob/master/README.md
then you need to transform your publish profile as well.
web.$(publish-profile-name).config is going to be your web.config name. You need to change environment variables of the transformed web.configs respectively.