This pertains to Web Deploy and/or Web Deployment Projects (not sure what the relation is between those). Simply curious about the constituent Tasks that I might be able to recompose into a customized package Target.
The publishing targets for generating msdeploy web packages can be located at :
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets
In addition to playing with the tasks, there are a variety of properties you can use to redirect the packaging output name, location and configuration....
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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 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.
I have a solution in VS2010 and it has three project, two of these projects have web config file, the projects have web config transformation for each environment (dev, test and prod).
At the process for TFS build option, I have the at the MSBuild Arguments : /p:DeployOnBuild=True
Everything looks good, the drop folder, the zip files and all structure for the final deployment. The issue I am facing the web config for test and prod is not created correctly after the final deployment, I could see at the drop folders the file projectName.SetParameters.xml, it contains the values for development when the build has been QUEUE for Test and Prod. One of the project has the correct web config (test and prod) but the other project has always the dev webconfig.
Is it a bug in the MS Build? What am I missing in the build parameters?
When I create a build deployment package the web config transformation creates the correct web config file, no issues with this process, but I do not want to use build deployment package to deploy my solution.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thank you.
In your Build Definition you probably defined the Configurations to use. Part of that also defines something like Any CPU or x86. As it turns out the solution the Platform "Any CPU" has a space where in the project files the Platform Any CPU does not have a space.
I found the best way to get around this was to leave the Platform blank and only put in the configuration name. VS will pop up a warning letting you know that there is data missing, you can just hit "Yes" to save it anyways. Alternatively you can just type in your configurations like the following |Release,|Debug.
The pattern is [PlatformName]|[ConfigurationName],[PlatformName]|[ConfigurationName],...
When we use TFS Team Build to compile and create deployment packages for each of the configurations for a project (Dev, Test, UAT, Live) (to get a necessary transformed web.config for each environement).
In order to include files outside of the project into the deployment package we have added something like the following in csproj file:
<Content Include="FilesToIncludeFolder\**\*" />
This works for all but one of the configurations. Ie the files get included in all but one of the packages.
The only difference between a configuration for which it works and one that it doesn't is its name and the fact we have a different web.config transform for each. Any ideas why this is happening?
In the log file created by msbuild the configuration that acts correctly has our files listed under this section
CollectFilesFromContent:
Gather all files from Project items #(Content). Adding:
When it doesn't work they aren't. It seems like the files within #Content become different for different configurations. Why should this be, there is nothing in our build process or csproj file that treats them differently and its the same csproj file in each case?
Our solution has got a ton of projects in it, and our MSBuild file is becoming a gigantic, unstable morass of angle brackets that has gotten so large that I've begun to be scared to touch it. However, I noticed that most of our projects fall into two groups.
There are web projects, which have a .csproj extension and are built and deployed using web deployment projects to dump them into a directory. There is also a configuration transform process. Basically, to deploy a web project, one only needs the project name, the output directory, and the config transforms.
Similarly, we have an ever-increasing number of service apps that will live under TopShelf. These are basically dlls that are built from .csproj files. Like the above websites, they undergo a config transform, but they are copied to the output directory instead of going through the web deployment steps.
It occurred to me that it would be really slick if I could simply provide the MSBuild project with a couple of text files (one for the webs and the other for the services) that MSBuild could then use to dynamically compile all the various projects. I was thinking that if I could just feed it a comma-delimited list of projects, output locations, and config replacement files that there might be a way to get msbuild to read them in, iterate over them, and dump out the projects where they are supposed to go.
However, my MSBuild-fu is weak. How do I even get started on this?
You can start here, this is part 2.
For config files I'm using XmlPreprocess tool for config files manipulation. It is using one mapping file for multiple environments. You can edit mapping file by Excel. It is very easy to use.