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I need to be able to generically and separately build and publish C# ASP.NET Web Applications. Ideally, I would like to use MSBuild to build the application, and if that succeeds, I would like to simply publish the site preferably solely with file copy.

Currently, I am able to build web application quite easily with MSBuild, but it is the publishing that is causing confusion. After the build, the binaries sit in the bin folder, but I am not sure what files to copy. What would be a good way to mimic the operations that VS's publish feature does, and still keeping everything generic?

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  • Any deployment task is just wrapped in MSBuild arguments. Commented Jun 9, 2014 at 14:37
  • With .NET CORE 3.0 this is simplified, Checkout this post: stackoverflow.com/a/56710981/6441150 Commented Jun 21, 2019 at 22:14

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You can invoke the Visual Studio web publish pipeline using the command line, check out this tutorial it shows you step by step how to do it:

Specifying the publish profile

You can specify the publish profile by name or by the full path to the .pubxml file, as shown in the following example:

msbuild C:\ContosoUniversity\ContosoUniversity.sln /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=C:\ContosoUniversity\ContosoUniversity\Properties\PublishProfiles\Test.pubxml

Web publish methods supported for command-line publishing

Three publish methods are supported for command line publishing:

  • MSDeploy - Publish by using Web Deploy.

  • Package - Publish by creating a Web Deploy Package. You have to install the package separately from the MSBuild command that creates it.

  • FileSystem - Publish by copying files to a specified folder.

http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/deployment/visual-studio-web-deployment/command-line-deployment

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4 Comments

thank you! I was thinking about doing that but would ideally prefer something simpler like file copy, or would it then not be possible to keep it generic?
You can create a FileSystem publish profile and then use the PublishProfile switch the article shows how to do this. Look towards the bottom of the article.
I followed the tutorial's instructions for building a project and the publish didn't work.
I would start a new question since this is 3 years old.
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The latest projects can be built by:

dotnet build MyWebsite.sln

For more info please refer the microsoft docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet-build

Note: Old ASP.NET projects are not supported. Please use MsBuild instead https://stackoverflow.com/a/24063993/1143349.

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