Web Deploy and console applications
18 Jan 2017Supporting links:
I blogged a few months ago about some tricks I learned about Web Deploy. While the integration for web projects is excellent thanks to WPP - Web Publishing Pipeline - we cannot say the same for console applications.
In this post, we will see how we can take advantage of Web Deploy to package and deploy console applications.
Packaging
When we build a console application, all the necessary files are output to a single folder which contains the executable, the configuration file and the necessary assemblies.
I didn’t know how Web Deploy was used by WPP to package a web application, so I read the documentation. In essence, Web Deploy can synchronise two data sources, each of them using a particular provider.
In our case, the source is the content of a folder, which is handled by the dirPath provider. The destination is a WebDeploy package, and for this matter, we can use the package provider. Here is a command we can execute to achieve this:
msdeploy.exe -verb:sync -source:dirPath="C:\source-directory" -dest:package="C:\destination-package.zip"
The good news is that we can declare parameters as we do for web applications with the declareParamFile operation. This allows us to set parameters values at deployment time for application settings or connection strings:
msdeploy.exe -verb:sync -source:dirPath="C:\source-directory" -dest:package="C:\destination-package.zip" -declareParamFile:"C:\parameters.xml"
This step is very easy to integrate with any CI server you might use. In the end, we get a parameterised package, ready to be deployed.
Deployment
What is the goal of the deployment of a console application? Most of the time, it will be to have all the necessary files in a specific folder so the program can run. Going from a package to a folder is the exact opposite of what we did to package the application.
It is indeed just a matter of switching the source and destination providers, and specifying values for the parameters we declared during the packaging phase. To do this, we use the setParamFile operation:
msdeploy.exe -verb:sync -source:package="C:\destination-package.zip" -dest:dirPath="C:\destination-folder" -setParamFile:"C:\parameters-values.xml"
And voilà, we’ve successfully packaged up a console application in a single package and deployed it with specific parameters. You can find sample code on my GitHub repository where I use PowerShell scripts to invoke Web Deploy.