How to publish a web project to multiple IIS sites

how-to-publish-to-multiple-iis.md

Scenario:

• I have a web project that I want to publish to multiple IIS sites
• Publish in VS should publish to devs local IIS server (MSDeploy)
• Publish from CI/CLI should publish to remote env (MSDeploy)
• CI/CLI and VS publish should be the same
• Building the solution takes ~3 min and should only be performed once
• Config files need to be transformed based on the dest env

Question:

How can I accomplish this?

Answer:

There are several different ways that you can solve this issue, each with its own pros/cons. For example, one method would be to create an MSDeploy package, and then use that to publish to multiple locations. In the past I've created package-web which can help with that. But package-web wasn't really designed with this scenario in mind, but more for deployments outside of VS.

I spent some time thinking about this and here is the proposed solution for this problem that I've come up with.

1: Create a script that knows how to publish a folder to an IIS server, with the following characteristics.

• Parameter for the folder to publish
• Parameter for env name. Using the env name the script will transform web.original.config using web.ENV.config and place web.config in the publish folder.
• Parameters needed for publish settings (i.e. MSDeploy settings), or it can be found using conventions and the env name parameter.
• web.original.config should be excluded from publish using MSDeploy parameters.
• Parameter for the source folder. This is used for cases outside of VS, and the script should be able to build and publish using a publish profile (more on that below). When this parameter is passed the folder to publish parameter should be ignored.

Note: I personally would create a PowerShell script here

2: Create a publish profile in VS that will do the following.

• Publish to a folder
• After publish is finished web.config is renamed to web.original.config. Create a target with AfterTargets="Publish" to do this work.
• Calls the script created in step 1 to publish to local IIS for the 3 target destinations

Then in VS when a developer publishes the project, it will first publish the files to a folder and run the build config transform (i.e. web.release.config) and then the script is invoked three times to do the local publish.

For your CI/CLI publish you just call the script and pass in different parameters based on the env/dest, as well as the source folder. It should call msbuild.exe to build and publish the project using the folder profile. To do that invoke MSBuild with /p:DeployOnBuild=true;publishprofile="NAME-OF-THIS-PROFILE". Note if you're building a .sln file see my blog post at http://sedodream.com/2013/03/06/HowToPublishOneWebProjectFromASolution.aspx.

As for implementing the script, if you use PowerShell, I'd recommend looking at the publish-module. This is module developed by me and the aspnet team, when I used to work on the team, for ASP.NET 5. It's no longer being used in VS or maintained, but I believe it's high quality and you should be able to fix any issues that you run into. I doubt you'll run into many though. If you do look at that there is good docs using Get-Help. You can also view the help by looking at the .psm1 file on github, for example https://github.com/aspnet/vsweb-publish/blob/master/publish-module.psm1#L264.

With that being said, you don't need to use that module. You can just call msdeploy.exe directly. If you do use PowerShell to do this, and you don't use publish-module then I'd recommend copying the Execute-Command function in that module to your PowerShell file and then use that to invoke msdeploy.exe.