any way to pass -Usechecksum to msdeploy using msbuild - msdeploy

I have a website with lots of files using team build and deploying though web deploy packages. The problem i am having is that the packages are build from one of the machines from the farm and the time stamp will not always match. By default with web deploy that means a full site roll and with so many file and the sync across the cluster this is not optimal.
With cmd line deploy i can pass -UseCheckSum and this is solved for manual deployment. Now i'm trying to use a CI build with auto deploy and passing MSbuild arguments though my build setup. Is there a way to get this to deploy in the same manner?

You can't do it in your MSBuild, but you can edit the Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets file on the build server to apply -UseChecksum.
See my answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13863041/8037
UPDATE: MS has added the ability to pass the UseChecksum flag to VS 2013. To do this, add the following property to the .pubxml file:
<MSDeployUseChecksum>true</MSDeployUseChecksum>
Further information can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2013/10/30/web-publishing-updates-for-app-offline-and-usechecksum.aspx

If, by "MSBuild" you mean the Web Publishing Pipeline, then the answer is no. The MSDeploy msbuild task supports a UseChecksum property, but the WPP targets provide no mechanism through which you can set it. This is also true of a number of other features (like stored credentials).

Related

Deploying specific TeamCity build Arifact using Build Master

We use Team City as our CI server and Build Master as our deployment mechanism. I have a project that builds and runs test on teamcity and creates a release-0.0.%build.number%.zip.
How do i instruct Build Master to get the latest release-0.0.%build.number%.zip?
Currently I use Create Build Artifact which collects files from a directory, but this is causing problems for us. I already have the artifact as a .zip and just want to deploy that.
Have you looked at the TeamCity Extensions? The idea that immediately comes to mind is to use the Get TeamCity Artifact action, which has the option to use latest Build or specify a variable. This might be easiser than pulling from disk, too.

web.config transform at deploy time not build

I'm wanting to know how to perform the following
Build & package an ASP.NET website to the file system
Be able to deploy the website to one or more environments. I want to the transforms of config file to happen at the point of deployment, rather than at the point of building. This way my code is not recompiled for each deployment and there is not risk of new changes being introduced.
From my own reading I'm unsure of how to do this. WebDeploy seems to package, transform and deploy based on a configuration but Im unsure how these steps can be decoupled to avoid the need to recompile code from source control.
Does anyone have any experience in solving this issue?
You can use the Parameterization feature of web deploy a.k.a MSDeploy. You will need to use a parameters.xml file and a setParameters.xml file to dynamically swap out settings since you are not transforming your package at build time.
At deployment time you can pass in any .xml file to set the parameters you have specified in the parameters.xml file. Since the parameters.xml is at the root of your project solution (e.g see example link of where to place the file) then at build time it gets baked into your web package. However, you now have the flexibility to change those values by passing in the setParms .xml file from the command line during deployment. This is different than transforming the values during build time based on configuration settings.
Here is a msdeploy command line example of passing in a ParamFile for a staging environment.
msdeploy -verb:sync -source:package="c:\packages\mypackage.zip" -dest:auto,computername=StagingServer1 -setParamFile="c:\StagingParameters.xml"
See the below links for examples and MSDN technical information:
Web Deploy Parameterization in Action
Parameterization vs. Web.Config Transformation
Web Deploy Operation Settings
Similar question on stackoverflow that provides several methods

MSBuild: Web application, build once package and deploy many

I'm sure this question has come up before, but I can't seem to find an elegant solution.
I have a web application project with multiple configurations based on deployment environment (Test, QA, Production) along with web.config transforms for each environment. We are using a web deployment package to automatically create the .zip of the app which can be deployed via MSDeploy. It's easy enough to call the package target multiple times, each with a different configuration:
msbuild MyProject.csproj /t:Package /p:Configuration=QA
msbuild MyProject.csproj /t:Package /p:Configuration=Test
But this triggers a complete rebuild of the web project each time before packaging. I want to build once, then apply the web.config transforms, and create separate packages for each environment. Is there an easy way to accomplish this without forcing a complete rebuild for each environment?
Dupe of Build once and deploy to multiple environments with msdeploy & Visual Studio 2012
I've also been wanting a solution to this, but apparently there isn't any real COMPLETE MS solution that I know of. Visual Studio provides the following (as noted here):
Web.Config transformation
Parameterization
Vishal Joshi concluded with the following:
If you can know your environment settings during build time use
Web.Config transformation.
If you would want to create deployment package only once and then
enter the settings during install time then use Parameters.xml
What I would like to see, though, is have the best of both worlds. I want to "package" up a target having ALL the configuration transformations embedded. Therefore, when the IT guy runs the WebDeploy cmd file (that gets generated when you "package"), they can provide a switch of which environment configuration they want (i.e. Dev, Test, Stage, Prod, Release, etc). I don't believe there is a solution from MS out there that does that. :(

Better alternative to Web Deploy Projects

I have a solution with a fair few projects, 3 of them web-based (WCF in IIS / MVC site). When the solution builds, it dumps each of the components of this distributed system in a 'Build' folder. Running the 'configurator' part of the whole output will set up the system in the cloud automatically. It's very neat :) However, the Web Deploy Projects are a major pain. They "build" (i.e. deploy) every, single, time I build - even when no changes have been made to their respective projects.
Changed a single line of code? Look forward to waiting around a minute for the 3 web projects to redeploy.
[These projects are VERY straightforward at the moment - two have a single .svc and one .ashx file - the other is an MVC app with ~5 views]
I realise I can change solution configurations to not 'build' them, but I've been doing that and it's very easy to log on the next day and forget about it, and spend a couple of hours tracking down bugs in distributed systems due to something simply having not been built.
Why I use Web Deploy Projects? Well, because I need all pages + binaries from the web project. The build output for the project itself is the 'bin' folder, so no pages. The entire project folder? It has .cs, .csproj and other files I don't want included.
This will be building on build servers eventually, but it's local at the moment. But I want a quick way of getting the actual output files from the web project to my target folder. Any ideas?
Not sure if this will help in your situation, (plug for own project coming up), but I am working on a project to help ease IIS deployments:
https://github.com/twistedtwig/AutomatedDeployments
The idea being you can use config files for IIS (app Pool, applications and websites) to automate the creation and update of sites locally (dev machines) or remotely (test and production machines).
It is still a work in progress but is ready to be used in production systems.
using the package creation as a post build step might get you closer to what you want, (don't believe it includes all the extra files), but that would still build it each time, (although if code hasn't changed it should not rebuild unless you choose rebuild all projects).
In the end I created a utility/tool which, given a project file, XCOPYies the project folder for the web project to a target location, then looks in said project file and deletes anything that doesn't have Build Action set to Content. Very quick and effective.
I know it is still in RC but VS2012 does have a neat feature when doing publish that it detects the changes and publishes only those. Might be something a little deeper down in the build where it does an automatic publish too.
You can take a look to the Octopus project: http://octopusdeploy.com/
Deployment based on nuget packages.

Can't msdeploy web package to temporary folder?

We've got an Asp.Net web application we're trying to get pseudo-deployed to a folder, and I'm starting to think Microsoft are crazy -- why is it so hard to get a WAP to do a "Local FileSystem" deploy as part of MSBuild?
I can build with this:
msbuild .\SubSite.csproj "/p:Platform=AnyCPU;Configuration=Release" /t:Package
And get a nice package.zip which I can deploy to a website...
However, I have two projects in my solution, which I need to combine before I ship them, so I want to deploy both packages into a folder, and then re-package that folder. Despite the documentation on technet to the contrary, it doesn't seem to be possible to do:
msdeploy -verb:sync -source:package=.\SubSite.zip -dest:contentPath=.\Www\SubSite
Because you get the error:
Source (sitemanifest) and destination (contentPath) are not compatible for the given operation.
Does anyone have a suggestion of how I could web deploy two sites inside one another without manually copying files out of a "PackageTmp" folder? I mean, I'm aware that I could just skip zipping the package and manually copy the files out to do this, but I'm not happy about having to create a custom target, and there's no other way to find that just to do something that should be built in.
We did eventually figure out how to do this, but I'm not really happy about it ;-)
Basically, (as mentioned elsewhere on so), you can call msbuild with the target set to _WPPCopyWebApplication. You can also specify/override the WebProjectOutputDir property when you do that. Something like this (where ${name} are variables we're using)
msbuild ${SourcePath}\Www\UI\UI.csproj "/p:Platform=AnyCPU;Configuration=Release;WebProjectOutputDir=${OutputPath}\AppRoot" "/t:_WPPCopyWebApplication"
msbuild ${SourcePath}\Www\Mobile\Mobile.csproj "/p:Platform=AnyCPU;Configuration=Release;WebProjectOutputDir=${OutputPath}\AppRoot\Mobile" "/t:_WPPCopyWebApplication"
msbuild ${SourcePath}\Www\Service\WebService.csproj "/p:Platform=AnyCPU;Configuration=Release;WebProjectOutputDir=${OutputPath}\AppRoot\WebServices" "/t:_WPPCopyWebApplication"
We can then package up the whole "AppRoot" in a separate step.

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