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How does one go about installing ASP.NET MVC 4 on a server. The Web Platform Installer insists on installing all kinds of Visual Studio 2010 stuff. I don't see a "server only" installation. For example, it wants to install "Visual Studio 2010 Core SP1" and "Visual Web Developer Express".

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  • Wrong StackExchange site. Try here next time. serverfault.com Commented Aug 21, 2012 at 17:24
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    You should not be doing that. You should be using the ASP.NET MVC 4 nuget package which will add all needed assemblies as Copy Local Always so when you deploy it will include them all as part of the site/application Commented Aug 22, 2012 at 21:38
  • To add: This is a big deal because once you have it in GAC it will always override the local version which can lead to bizzare problems when updates come! Commented Aug 22, 2012 at 21:59

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Get the standalone installer from http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc4

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This is not a great option. The standalone installer is intended to be installed with Visual Studio 2010. We don't run Visual Studio 2010. We need an installer that at most gets the MVC v4 assemblies in to the GAC. They are in the GAC on the build servers, so don't get copied to the bin at compile time. It's frustrating that Microsoft still isn't thinking about operational concerns.
Yes. I've tried it. But it makes our operations team nervous. They don't know what kind of side-affects the installer has: what additional stuff it installs that they don't know about.
@splatteredbits, if your operations team is any good they can monitor the changes made by the install, and by doing so on a virtual test machine they don't run any risk whatsoever. I bet that many of the hotfixes delivered via Windows Update are more suspect in what they do than this installer.
@SteveOwen, I just tried the download again and it worked perfectly on a clean server. The server has no VS, VWD, SDK or so installed. Make sure that there isn't an old version of VS or similar on that machine, which may trigger the VS installation code in the setup.
Yeah, don't use the web platform installer for installing on the server. Use the above standalone mvc4 installer. Works great for me :)
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The safest thing to do would be to mark your reference to System.Web.Mvc as "copy local = true" in the reference's properties window. When you do a deploy, it will get copied into your bin folder.

It feels a bit backwards, but there you go.

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Or more approriately, install the MVC nuget package, which does this for you. Which, in turn, is not at all backwards, because it allows coexistence of different versions, so each project can be sure it gets the version it was built against. Having it in the GAC would override this.
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I would install and run on local host, then use Visual Studio's "publish" to publish it to a web server. You can install it via http://www.asp.net/mvc. If you're asking how to install it on IIS, then read this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rickandy/archive/2011/04/22/test-you-asp-net-mvc-or-webforms-application-on-iis-7-in-30-seconds.aspx

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