Agfdhyk

So, I created a publish profile for my web app. I did this with the GUI in VS 2017 Enterprise. I then found an example of how to change the pubxml to make it zip all the output files. Eventually I ended up with this:

<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">

    <PropertyGroup>

        <WebPublishMethod>FileSystem</WebPublishMethod>

        <PublishProvider>FileSystem</PublishProvider>

        <LastUsedBuildConfiguration>Release</LastUsedBuildConfiguration>

        <LastUsedPlatform>Any CPU</LastUsedPlatform>

        <SiteUrlToLaunchAfterPublish />

        <LaunchSiteAfterPublish>True</LaunchSiteAfterPublish>

        <PrecompileBeforePublish>True</PrecompileBeforePublish>

        <EnableUpdateable>True</EnableUpdateable>

        <DebugSymbols>False</DebugSymbols>

        <WDPMergeOption>DonotMerge</WDPMergeOption>

        <ExcludeApp_Data>False</ExcludeApp_Data>

        <publishUrl>binReleasePublish</publishUrl>

        <DeleteExistingFiles>True</DeleteExistingFiles>

        <Configuration>Release</Configuration>

    </PropertyGroup>

    <Target Name="ZipPublishOutput" AfterTargets="GatherAllFilesToPublish">

        <Exec Command='powershell -nologo -noprofile -command "compress-archive -force -path $(WPPAllFilesInSingleFolder)* -destinationpath $(publishUrl).zip"' />

    </Target>

</Project>

This works perfectly fine if I do a publish through Visual Studio. However, I've been trying everything I can think of to get this to work in MSBuild, with no luck.

Here is an example of what I think should work:

"C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio2017EnterpriseMSBuild15.0BinMSBuild.exe" WebApp.csproj /nologo /p:Configuration=Release /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=ReleasePublish

And for reference, here is the version of MSBuild:

Microsoft (R) Build Engine version 15.9.20+g88f5fadfbe for .NET Framework

I know MSBuild is finding the profile pubxml because I can make a change to the settings, such as publishUrl, and those changes are applied the next time I run MSBuild. What doesn't seem to work is the ZipPublishOutput target. And even running MSBuild with diagnostic verbosity shows that GatherAllFilesToPublish never runs, which would mean my target wouldn't run.

I've found many different suggestions and nothing seems to help. A lot of the solutions I found seemed to be with MSBuild not finding the pubxml, but that's not the case here.

So, is GatherAllFilesToPublish something that is Visual Studio specific, and therefore MSBuild doesn't know about it? That seems like how it's acting.

Just got the same problem using msbuild with Jenkins.
To execute the target GatherAllFilesToPublish with msbuild I had to add the target /t:GatherAllFilesToPublish in the msbuild command line.

You should have something like this :

/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=fullPathToMyPubXML.pubxml
/t:GatherAllFilesToPublish