Web Deploy - Using Relative Paths for local file system deployment

Question

I am wanting to use Web Deploy to run a custom deployment setup.

As I am wanting to have this work fine when running on many different environments (team members local m

Answer 1

We have a bug here, when publishing using File system you have to provide a full path. We actually found this bug earlier this week. It will be fixed in our next update. In this case when the relative path is passed it incorrectly thinks that its an IIS path.

As a workaround you can edit the .pubxml to make the publishUrl a fullpath. Fortunately you can use an MSBuild property so that this works in team scenarios. Here is what you should do, edit your .pubxml file and update the value of publishUrl to be the following.

<publishUrl>$(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)..\..\..\Deploy_Production</publishUrl>

This path will be relative to the .pubxml file itself. I've verified that this works from both the command line as well as the publish dialog. If you have any issues with this let me know, but the fix should hopefully be released in a few months [no guarantees of course :) ].