Msdeploy not removing the NON-empty directory during deployment - msdeploy

Question

I am getting following error during deployment when there was a folder recursively removed from code. As a workaround i had to manually delete the folder from destination path on server.
Error: (12/26/2018 4:32:27 AM) An error occurred when the request was processed on the remote computer.
Error: An error was encountered when processing operation 'Delete Directory' on 'C:\Alam\Test\MSF\Config'.
Error: The error code was 0x80070091.
Error: The directory is not empty.
at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.NativeMethods.RaiseIOExceptionFromErrorCode(Win32ErrorCode errorCode, String maybeFullPat
h)
at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DirectoryEx.Delete(String path)
at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DirPathProviderBase.Delete(Boolean whatIf)
Error count: 1.

Answer 1

I can confirm this bug.
If a file in a directory that should be deleted (i.e. that is not excluded) is excluded then the file does not get deleted and the following rmdir crashes MsDeploy.
Work around
You must exactly ensure that no file exclution rule happens to match to a sub folder that is not excluded.
To satify this condition all file exclution rules must match from the deploy root path only. Otherwise a file in a sub directory may not be deleted and the following directory removal fails.
It can be quite difficult to ensure this, because the initial part of the deploy path ist typically not predictable if you do not always deploy to only one directory on only one server.
Fortunately MsDeploy tends to use different path delimiters for the target directory and the sub directories, e.g.:
Default Web Site/VirtualPath\Folder\File. Note the forward slash and the backslash.
So it is possible to use the forward slash as indicator of the root path.
Example
<MsDeploySkipRules Include="CustomSkipFile">
<ObjectName>filePath</ObjectName>
<AbsolutePath>/[^\\]+\\Custom</AbsolutePath>
</MsDeploySkipRules>
<MsDeploySkipRules Include="CustomSkipFile">
<ObjectName>dirPath</ObjectName>
<AbsolutePath>/[^\\]+\\Custom</AbsolutePath>
</MsDeploySkipRules>
This will exclude all files starting with Custom in the top level and all directories starting with Custom in the top level.
But this will not exclude a file that starts with Custom in a sub directory that does not start with Custom like notCustomDir\Custom.csv.
The /[^\\]+\\ prefix ensures that the following part cannot match to a deeper path because the latter is not delimited with a forward slash.
I would not consider this a sophisticated solution. It is just the only one I got working.