Visual Studio. Publish project from command line

Question

Is there a way to publish a web project in MS Visual Studio 2010 using CLI? I use DevEnv.exe /Build to build a project and it works fine, but I could not find option to Publish a project.

One other thing I want to mention. I am trying to publish web project NOT to the IIS directly. I have a location where I publish several projects and then build them automatically into NSIS bundle to be deployed.

score 48 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 17 '20 at 22:05

48

From ASP.NET Web Deployment using Visual Studio: Command Line Deployment, you can use

msbuild myproject.csproj /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=MyPublishProfile

where MyPublishProfile is the profile name that you've already set up somewhere

edited Jan 17 '20 at 22:05

KyleMit

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answered Apr 25 '14 at 15:41

dten

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`Can't find the valid AspnetMergePath` – Toolkit Jan 10 '21 at 12:37

score 29 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 17 '20 at 22:03

29

What works best is to add following target to the project file:

<Target Name="AfterBuild">
   <Message Text="Copying to Deployment Dir:" />
   <Copy SourceFiles="@(Content)" DestinationFolder="..\XXX\%(Content.RelativeDir)" />
      <CreateItem Include="$(OutputPath)\*">
        <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="Binaries"/>
      </CreateItem>
   <Copy SourceFiles="@(Binaries)" DestinationFolder="..\XXX\bin" />
</Target>

This way, whenever project got build (from command line or from IDE) it automatically get deployed to specified folder. Thank you everybody for pointing me to right direction.

edited Jan 17 '20 at 22:03

KyleMit

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answered May 05 '10 at 17:32

sha

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Problem I have with this is that it publishes both debug and release modes doesn't it? That could have serious consequences for a live site if your debug config gets published. Think what we need is a CLI batch that does: 'build Release and Publish with this publish setting'. – Rob Kent Jan 13 '12 at 17:01
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@RobKent you can set up config file transformations which you can then use to trigger the above behavior only for certain build configurations. Just google .net config transforms. – Brian Sweeney Jun 13 '14 at 13:45
does it tale care of web.config merging? – Toolkit Jan 10 '21 at 12:39

Ted Nyberg · Answer 3 · 2013-01-30T09:41:30.300

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The /t:publish switch is for ClickOnce applications only, it's not applicable to web projects. Hence the error saying it's unpublishable. :)

edited Jan 30 '13 at 09:41

answered Sep 17 '11 at 09:18

Ted Nyberg

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This is not an answer. – Gusdor Nov 23 '15 at 11:00
@Gusdor It was an answer to the OP, as it originally asked why there was an error saying the solution was 'unpublishable'. – Ted Nyberg Sep 13 '16 at 13:40
It wasn't an answer to the OP's question, but a response to his comment on another answer... – Auspex Sep 12 '18 at 14:22

Visual Studio. Publish project from command line

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