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.
Related
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.
I am using MSbuild to create a deployment package (simply copying various files from the projects in my solution to different folders) I would like the root folder to be of the format
DeploymentPackage2.3.4.5ForRelease
How can I get MSbuild to put the Assembly number in the folder name automatically?
EDIT:
The solution has a great deal of projects in it (too many really) they all get their version number from a SharedAssemblyInfo.cs file that is manually updated but in the fullness of time will pick up the svn build number (but that is a job for later)
I am building using an external .bat file that calls a custom written .targets/.proj setup that simply calls msbuild on the .sln of the solution.
The 'create package' step I am trying to create happens after a succesful build and will eventually be run by our CI framework, however I would like to be able to run it locally too.
I have created a "CreatePackage" target that does the copying that I want, however it is currently into a fixed folder. I need the folder name to reflect the AssemblyVersion of one of the final dll's.
If there is a better way then I want to know about it... but I am going to use this I think
MSBuild Task to read version of dll
I've got a fairly large MVC2 project in TFS which gets built automatically on checkin (Continuous Integration)
At present, the fully built version is dumped on a network share on our dev IIS server. \\Server\wwwrootLatest
TFS of course creates lots of sub-folders since it's just doing a build, it isn't even aware that it's drop directory is a wwwroot.
This means that to actually USE the build, we need to go and manually create an IIS App which points at the appropriate directory - which defeats the whole object of the exercise.
When we do a manual publish to that server, we use "File System" as the method and just overwrite the files in the UNC share \\Server\wwwroot
(When publishing to other environments, we use full-on MSDeploy.)
What I'd like to do is convince TFS to do a "File system" publish after the build completes and duplicate what we do on a manual publish eg:
Drop directory is \\Server\Build which would result in something like \\Server\Build\Project\Date.Rev\
After that is complete, we want it to publish to \\Server\wwwrootLatest - we can then set up the App once which will always contain the latest version but will still have a full history if required.
The only examples I've been able to find use MSBuild commands in the build definition (fine) but all use MSDeploy to do a full-on publish. I'm not sure how to automate what I want to do
Any help appreciated.
In your drop folder a folder named _PublishedWebsites is generated automatically. It contains files you need to put in wwwroot. You can use CopyDirectory build activity to copy them automatically.
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.