Deploy Web Service to Nuget Package

Question

I have several WCF and WebAPI services as well as MVC websites in a visual studio solution. Currently, we are creating WebDeploy packages for these services and websites to deploy to IIS. I'm starting to look into Octopus Deploy for deploying our services and websites instead of WebDeploy. However, Octopus Deploy uses Nuget packages to deploy.

I'm trying to figure out how I can easily create a Nuget package that contains all the files that would normally be published into a WebDeploy package. This may not be all files in the project directory or the bin directory. I found this blog post describing how to package a csproj into a Nuget package during the build, but I found that the resulting package didn't contain any of my dependency dll's. I realize I could write a nuspec for each of these projects manually and include exactly the files I want, but I'm looking for a more automatic way as this would create more maintenance when my project changes.

Does anyone out there know a good way to generate a nuspec or Nuget package that contains only the files needed to run the application, similar to the way publishing to a WebDeploy package only includes the files it needs?

Answer 1

Octopus Deploy has a CLI called "Octo.exe" that can package up your application into a NUPKG.

You will need to install Octopus Tools which you can download from https://octopus.com/downloads

Please see http://docs.octopusdeploy.com/display/OD/Using+Octo.exe for the documentation and how to use it.

A good example to use Octo.exe is part of a Continuous Integration pipeline when the build has successfully passed you call it to package the application and send it to the Octopus server.

Answer 2

After some playing around with Visual Studio, MSBuild, and TeamCity, I discovered a method that works for me. My issues was that I did not want to package up all the files in my project directory, only those that are necessary to run the application. WebDeploy handles this quite nicely as one of the options when publishing. I already have settings in my csproj file that will create a WebDeploy package on build, but this is a zip file and I don't want the zip file in my Nuget package.

I found 2 ways to deal with this:

1. In TeamCity, I set up a new Build Configuration that will package any nuspec files I have and publish the resulting Nuget packages to my Octopus Deploy Nuget feed. I figured out that I can use the existing WebDeploy package that gets created by my CI build configuration as an artifact dependency and TeamCity can actually unpack the zip file when grabbing the artifacts as part of that dependency. Then my nuspec file references the entire folder structure that was extracted from the zip file and packages it into a Nupak.

2. I was able to modify my csproj settings to use a specific publish profile I generated in Visual Studio that would perform a WebDeploy package to file system. This would result in the same folder structure as is in the zip file from #1, but simply copied to a directory. Then my Nuget build configuration could simply grab those dependencies and package them the same way as in #1.

I decided to go with option #1 as it would require minimal changes to my existing csproj and CI build configuration, and it would not break our current method of deploying using WebDeploy.