I am trying to exclude certain files/folders from deployment of a web project in Visual Studio Online to an Azure website.
The web project has a Content folder with CSS, JS, build scripts and so on, which are only necessary for development, once deployed to Azure the CSS and JS is loaded from a CDN. Currently the build from VSO is copying all those files to the webroot in Azure, which is unnecessary and a potential security issue in case of the build scripts.
Now I know this can be prevented by setting the build action of a file to None, but this a very tedious solution because there is a lot of development going on, new files get added all the time and it is easy to forget this setting.
First I tried setting the Content folder to Cloaked in the build definitions source settings, but this only causes VSO to not download this folder on build, msbuild will still complain that those files are missing.
Is there a way to tell msbuild to ignore the whole Content folder? I already tried adding /p:ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment="Content" as a msbuild argument in the build definition, and also tried the solutions in here How to get Visual Studio 'Publish' functionality to include files from post build event?, but nothing is working.
I was studying msbuild log files and came up with a solution that is good enough for us to work with.
The first thing I learned was that I cannot prevent msbuild from copying files with build action Content to the output directory, at least not without changing the Microsoft.WebApplication.targets file, which I didn't want to do and am not even sure is possible with VSO build.
Anyway because of this we cannot set the source settings of our Content folder to Cloaked in the build definition, since this will cause the build to fail.
What we ended up doing was described in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3140349/1230302
So by adding the ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment statement to the .csproj file, the Content folder is excluded from the webroot.
<PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU'">
<OutputPath>bin\</OutputPath>
<ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment>Content</ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment>
</PropertyGroup>
It is not an ideal solution, but at least this way nothing gets deployed if a developer forgets to set the build action to None.
The built in continuous delivery options are designed for convenience. Of you need something custom, like skipping deployment of files that have not changed, then you will need to write something yourself.
You can easily call PowerShell to complete any task from the build process.
If you'd like to customize your build as part of the VSO build system, you can just override your BuildTemplate.xaml file.
Visual Studio Build uses Windows Workflow (xaml) to make a workflow on what the build is supposed to do. You can edit this file and do any modifications to the directory structure before or after the build.
Here is an example.
Related
My C# projectA published via ClickOnce depends on projectB. I need the projectB.dll.config file for projectA to work. While MSBuild copies over projectB.dll.config to projectA/bin/ConfigXY correctly, it is not published. VisualStudio (2017) doesn't even show the file in Application->Publish->Application Files.
As a workaround, I added this to A.csproj:
<Content Include="..\projectB\bin\Release\projectB.dll.config">
<Link>projectB.dll.config</Link>
<CopyToOutputDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToOutputDirectory>
</Content>
Now VS shows the file in the "Application Files" list, but this of course works only for the Release build config. Since I have lots of configs in project A that map to different configs in B, I cannot simple use $(Configuration) in the path.
I have found some suggestions to include ..\**\*.dll.config, but that seems dangerous, as when both the Debug and Release folder exist (from a previous build), I might end up with the wrong one.
What's the right way to do this?
I’d like to post this as a comment, but due to the limitations, I post it as an answer and I am sorry for that.
I did some tests, and it seems, to include the project.dll.config file to be published(shown in Application > Publish > Application Files), we need to include this file to the projectA.
I guess you mean you want to use “..\XXX\XXX\Release\projectB.dll.config” path for Release build and use ““..\XXX\XXX\Debug\projectB.dll.config” path for Debug build without using $(Configuration) right?
Generally, MSBuild uses $(configuration) to switch the configuration mode, if it is not available for you, to my knowledge, from MSBuild side, it is hard or not possible to switch/match the configuration mode.
I have an automated build process set up to run from a build definition in TFS, which publishes a web application and generates/executes a database project script successfully via publish profiles that are passed as msbuild arguments in the build process definition. Everything is now running as expected except that several unnecessary files are being deployed to the target folder, including the .csproj file, all of the config transforms, and the properties folder which contains all of my publish profiles.
This is strange because 1. It's definitely not including ALL files/folders and mostly appears to be including ones used by the publish profile like transforms, while applying the transform correctly and excluding any explicitly excluded file (as defined in the pubxml), and 2. The process works perfectly if I do it by publishing from the project in Visual Studio 2013. I have the profile configured to only include files needed by the application, and I've confirmed in the csproj file that this property is there.
I tried excluding the properties folder from deployment in the pubxml file, but this causes the build to crash because it can't find the assembly file. What I've gathered is that the process is keeping all files it needs to complete the build, and dropping all of those files in my destination folder. FWIW, I'm using the "file system" method and I'm not sure yet if web deploy will make a difference. I haven't been able yet to connect to the target server with web deploy, but that's a separate problem to solve. Is there something in the build that I can configure so that my destination folder has only the files it needs to run the application, and not the files needed to BUILD the application?
FYI I also have not been using a drop folder, I'm not sure if that makes a difference or not but that might be the only thing I haven't tested as it doesn't seem necessary since I'm using a publishprofile and don't want to use the default tfs build configuration.
I found a solution that works well enough, after reading this: http://www.asp.net/web-forms/tutorials/deployment/advanced-enterprise-web-deployment/excluding-files-and-folders-from-deployment
This was a little uglier solution than I wanted, since it requires hard-coding the names of excluded files, but it does the trick and only requires identifying the files and folders in one location instead of altering a publish profile for each target environment. I created a wpp.targets file and used the ExcludeFromPackageFolders and ExcludeFromPackageFiles elements to identify the extra files. Ironically, if I don't also name the wpp.targets file in the exclude element, THAT file is included in my package. It's possible MSDeploy doesn't have the same issues with TFS as filesystem, but after spending half a day trying to work through a different set of issues and permissions workarounds, we decided that file system is a cleaner publishing method.
We're pretty new to TeamCity at work. We have a build & deployment pckage setup which is using MSBuild/MSDeploy to ship changes to our web servers. However, we have a few issues (apologies for putting a few questions on the same post). For clarification our solutions looks like so:
Project Folder
WebApp (includes .csproj file. Includes a folder called "media" - this folder is not in SVN)
Libraries (includes referenced assemblies)
Our issues:
There is a specific folder within the Libraries folder that must be copied into the bin directory after build (because of an assembly redirect). We have always used a PostBuild event, however this doesnt work in TeamCity.
The folder "media" within the WebApp folder is not included in SVN. When the TeamCity package is executed it deletes this folder. I would like to prevent TeamCity from deleting just this folder.
When we run the TeamCity task, we get an ERROR_FILE_IN_USE error for one of the files teamcity is trying to delete during the sync task. I have read about using the app_offline.htm file to combat this - but quite how Im not sure.
I'm going to guess that some of these settings can be command line parameters in the msbuild job - I think it would be better to store these in the csproj file rather than just in teamcity if it is possible?
thanks in advance
Al
A few questions on the information provided
Can you clarify what you mean by post-build command doesnt work? Does it fail or does it just not do what you expect?
How have you setup your post-build command? does it reference specific filepaths? TeamCity executes MSBuild in the same was as you could from the command line or from visual studio.
Regarding the MSDeploy folder issue, you can configure MSDeploy with a Skip Action, here's a link to another post describing how to do this
Prevent MSDeploy (selectively) from deleting folders on target IIS server
Because MSDeploy is trying to deploy into a folder being used by IIS you are also seeing the file locking issue. There are two solutions
1. Add a teamcity step to stop IIS (using PowerShell) before deploying. This will cause downtime.
2. Deploy to a different folder and then switch IIS to point to your new folder. This is a much better solution as you also have roll back.
A much easier solution to all of this is to use a Deployment Tool such as Octopus Deploy to deploy your application. You can learn more about Octopus Deploy at http://octopusdeploy.com/
Elsewhere on the Web, you can find recommendations on using something like this to simulate the Publish feature in the VS 2005-2008 IDE from a command-line (I hope I did not goof up the syntax!):
msbuild /t:ResolveReferences;_CopyWebApplication /p:BuildingProject=true;OutDir=C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ blah.csproj
Now, it looks like the .dll's copy fine. However, there are certain configuration files and template files that are copied to the bin folder which are needed for the app to work. For example, an NHibernate configuration file shows up in blah.csproj as:
<None Include="blah.cfg.xml">
<CopyToOutputDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToOutputDirectory>
</None>
While using Publish from within the IDE copies this file as it should, the aforementioned _CopyWebApplication target does not. I need this file to be copied in the build script. Is this desired behavior for _CopyWebApplication? Any recommendations on how to fix this?
EDIT 4/21/2010:
Let me clarify that we are limited (for now) to VS 2005 and VS 2008 projects, and that our build scripts are written for MSBuild 3.x. We are not yet ready to move to VS 2010.
Let me also specify that we are looking for a solution available from within a command line so that we can automate a Publish-like command along with custom build options, and possibly automate deployments down the road.
This is just a workaround.
In the build script for publishing Web sites, after running MSBuild on the Web project itself to publish it (Targets="ResolveReferences;_CopyWebApplication"), I added a copy operation:
<Copy SourceFiles="#(ProjectBinFiles)" DestinationFolder="$(StageBin)\%(ProjectBinFiles.RecursiveDir)" />
where ProjectBinFiles is an Item representing the files in the bin directory in the source directory, and StageBin is a Property representing the bin folder in the published site's directory. So far, it seems to work.
I was having a similar issue as well. I think the answer is using MSDeploy. Investigating it now, but may provide functionality required...
I had this same issue in VS 2012 and eventually fixed it by doing the following to any files which needed to be copied:
Set the Copy to Output file property to Copy if newer
Set the Build Action file property to Content (or Compile if the file needs to be compiled)
Ok, so I've got a somewhat complicated problem with my build environment that I'm trying to deal with.
I have a solution file that contains multiple C# projects which is built by a NAnt script calling MSBuild - passing MSBuild the name of the solution file and a path to copy the binaries to. This is because I want my automated build environment (CruiseControl.Net) to create a folder named after the revision of each build - this way I can easily go back to previous binaries for any reason.
So idealy I have a folder layout like this
c:\build\nightly\rev1
c:\build\nightly\rev2
c:\build\nightly\rev3
...
c:\build\nightly\rev10
etc.
The problem that's arisen is I recently added the latest version of the Unity IoC container to my project, checking it directly out of MS's online SVN repository. What's happening is I have a Silverlight 3 project that references the Silverlight version of Unity but I also have other projects (namely my Unit testing project) that reference the standard (non-Silverlight) version of Unity.
So what happens is since MSBuild is dumping everything into one single folder the Silverlight version of the Unity assembly is overwriting the non-Silverlight version because they have the exact same assembly file name.
Then when CruistControl runs my unit tests they fail because they don't have the proper dependencies available anymore (they try to load the Silverlight specific Unity assembly which obviously doesn't work).
So what I want to do is:
keep my desired output directory
structure (folder\revision)
I don't want to have to manually edit
every single proj file I have as this
is error prone when adding new
projects to the solution
Idealy I would like MSBuild to put everything into a folder structure similar to this:
nightly\revision1\project1
nightly\revision1\project2
nightly\revision1\project3
...
nightly\revision2\project1
nightly\revision2\project2
nightly\revision2\project3
etc
I can't modify the Unity project to give it a different file name because it comes from another SVN repository I cannot commit changes to. I found a similar question posted here and the suggested solution was to use a "master" MSBuild file that used a custom task to extract all the project file names out of the solution then loop over each one building them. I tried that but it doesn't build them in the order of their dependencies, so it fails for my project.
Help?
Firstly I would always have the build server delete the old working copy and check out a fresh copy to avoid any problems with stale artifacts from the previous build.
Next I would have nant or msbuild build the solutions as before with the artifacts from each build going to their local working output folders.
After that I'd move the artifacts from their working paths to their output paths, this shouldn't require digging through the project files since you can just tell msbuild/nant to copy working\project1\bin\release\**\*.* to artifacts\project1\.
The script that does this should ideally be stored along with the source with the main file, e.g. build.nant or build.proj in top level of the trunk.
For third party libraries I would simple include the DLLs directory in your repository. Nothing worse than writing some code and having a third party dependency break your build because of changes on their end.
Simply document the versions of the libraries you are using, and if you must update them, you'll have a better sense of what breaks the build before you even check it in.
Also, doesn't CC.Net automatically handle the providing of releases based on revision? I'm using TeamCity and it keeps a copy of the artifacts of every build.
I highly recommend reading JP Boodhoo's Automating Builds with NAnt blog series. That's been my starting point and have made lots of changes for my own taste. I also highly recommend checking out the builds of many open sources projects for examples. I've learned a lot from the builds of the Castle/Nhibernate/Rhino-Tools stack.