I’m currently working on moving our product from AWS to Azure and as part of the planning for that move, one of the problems I needed to solve was deployment. Our current deployments are handled by an automated build on Bamboo, but Bamboo doesn’t have a “Deploy to Azure” task. I needed to do the deploy from the command line (CMD or Powershell), and I wanted to avoid including publish profiles in the projects.
The first part, running from the command line was easy to find through with a Google search. You can just tell MSBuild to publish to Azure:
msbuild MyWeb\MyWeb.csproj /t:TransformWebConfig;Publish
/p:TargetProfile=ProdMyWebApp /p:Configuration=AzDev
But the catch is that you can’t do it without a publish profile as part of your project or at least I wasn’t able to make it work.
Instead of trying to do it with just MSBuild, I used MSBuild to build a deployment package.
MSBuild MyWeb\MyWeb.csproj
/target:TransformWebConfig;Package
/p:Configuration=Prod;PackageLocation="Deployment\Prod.zip"
That transforms the web.config and creates a .cmd executable that we can call and tell to publish to Azure or IIS is WebDeploy is enabled.
Deployment\Prod.Deploy.cmd
/M:https://mywebapp.scm.azurewebsites.net:443/MSDeploy.axd
/a:basic
/U:$mywebapp
/P:[userPWD from your publish profile]
/Y
You do still need to download the publish profile from the Azure portal and open it in a text editor to pull out the publishUrl, userName and userPWD. The /Y means that it will go through with the deploy. You can also use /T to do a ‘What If’.
With these commands, I was able to automatically deploy our web app to Azure during our build process. And since I didn’t need to store the publish profile in the .csproj file, I don’t need to worry about someone deploying something from their machine without checking the code into source control.
