How to: Publish a website using command prompt

Syed Aslam Basha here from the Information Security Tools team.

To test the tools which we develop on the team, at times I need to build a website and publish it. I use a simple way of publishing websites from the command line that saves me LOT of time so thought I would share it.

Launch notepad copy paste the below code and save it as Publish.cmd file. Run visual studio command prompt (as administrator) and run the publish.cmd.

  1: @ECHO OFF
  2: set WEB_ROOT=C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mytestsite
  3: set PROJECT_ROOT=D:\Source\website 
  4:  
  5: echo Publishing site %PROJECT_ROOT% to %WEB_ROOT% 
  6:  
  7: del /S /Q %WEB_ROOT%\*.* || goto Error
  8: rmdir /S /Q %WEB_ROOT%\ || goto Error
  9: aspnet_compiler -p "%PROJECT_ROOT%" /v /commercesite /d "%WEB_ROOT%" || goto Error 
  10:  
  11: goto Success
  12: :Error
  13: echo Site was not published 
  14:  
  15: goto End
  16:  
  17: :Success
  18: echo Site published successfully 
  19:  
  20: :End

If there aren’t any errors the site will be published successfully as shown below

C:\Windows\system32>D:\Source\website\publish.cmd
Publishing site D:\Source\website to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\mytestsite Utility to precompile an ASP.NET application
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Site published successfully
C:\Windows\system32>

Modify the above script parameters appropriately to publish site successfully!

-Syed Aslam Basha ( syedab@microsoft.com )

Microsoft Information Security Tools (IST) Team

Test Lead

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