MVC 3 Deploy Automation

Question

I am looking for the most straight forward way to automate the deploy of an MVC 3 application. There is a wealth of information on Stack Overflow already, but much of it seems to be old, and I am not sure what is still relevant to MVC 3.

Here is what I am trying to achieve:

Publish MVC application
Zip files
Copy zip to remote location

It is the “Publish” part of this I am having the most trouble with. Here are my main points of confusion:

How can an automated build be initiated for an MVC 3 app? Do we need to use the AspNetComiler MSBuild Task? I have seen an example of this uses in conjunction with a CSC Task. Are both really needed?
There is a “Build Deployment Package” option in Visual Studio. Can this be initiated with MSBuild? Should this be used instead?
Web Deployment Projects: where do these fit into the picture?

Thanks for any help

Where are you deploying this to? A local instance of IIS? Azure? Windows Server hosted somewhere else? — slandau
– slandau, Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 15:25

Darin Dimitrov · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-02 15:27:46Z

2

I am by far not specialist in application deployment so there might be better ways but here's what I do.

I use Web Deployment Projects to precompile my ASP.NET MVC 3 application
I feed the result of this project to a Setup and Deployment Project
I wrote a custom assembly which is applied to this Setup and Deplyment Project as an Install step and which based on the target IIS version creates App Pool and Virtual Directories.
I ship an MSI to the team responsible for deploying the application. All they need to do is to schedule a task which does an msiexec /u myapp.msi and then msiexec /i myapp.msi.

Remark : in my case all builds are automated in a continuous integration fashion with a Team Foundation Server Build but if you don't have a build server you could also build it manually by running the setup and deployment project which spits an MSI.

answered Sep 2, 2011 at 15:27

Darin Dimitrov

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2 Comments

James Over a year ago

Web Deployment Projects look interesting, thanks for the link. That may well be the answer. Do they need Visual Studio to run, or can they be built on a server without a VS install? Also, I would still like to understand if the ASPNetCompiler is still relevant for MVC 3, and also to automate the creation of a Build Deployment Package. Just trying to understand the options, so I can make an educated decision about which is right for our situation.

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

@James, Web Deployment Projects do not require Visual Studio to build. They only need MSBuild as they are implemented as custom MSBuild tasks.

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