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 machines, 4 different builds servers) I want to deploy to a local path that is relative.

What I am wanting to do is:

• Deploy to a local relative path
• Have the after build step do magical things...

However when i enter the local file path to deploy to as: "..\Deploy_Production"

web deploy complains with this:

2>Connecting to ..\Deploy_Live...
2>Unable to create the Web site '../Deploy_Live'.  The URL http://:0 is invalid.

Its as if Web deploy thinks that the relative file path is a website URL. Using "..\" instead doesn't help my cause.

How do you get WebDeploy to deploy to a local relative path?

Edit 1:

I have tried to use a ConvertToAbsolutePath task before build, to no avail:

  <PropertyGroup>
    <WebPublishMethod>FileSystem</WebPublishMethod>
    <SiteUrlToLaunchAfterPublish>http://mywebsite.com</SiteUrlToLaunchAfterPublish>
    <publishUrl>..\Deploy_Production</publishUrl>
    <DeleteExistingFiles>False</DeleteExistingFiles>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <Target Name="BeforeBuild">
    <ConvertToAbsolutePath Paths="$(publishUrl)">
      <Output TaskParameter="AbsolutePaths" PropertyName="publishUrl" />
    </ConvertToAbsolutePath>
  </Target>

Edit 2: The above works, but only when running commandline builds against the Solution file not a project file

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 :) ].