Publishing vs2012 solution from TeamCity

Question

I'm using Visual Studio 2012 and the publishing feature. I have created a publishing profile that deploys my application to a development server, and it works great when executed from vs2012 on my machine. Here is my problem; on the development server I also have TeamCity installed and I would like to trigger the publishing after a build have completed. So I created a simple build step that looks like this:

Build file path: .\src\Solution.sln
Targets: Rebuild
Command line parameters: /p:DeployOnBuild=true;PublishProfile=Ci

When this step is executing I get the following error:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets(4377, 5): error ERROR_USER_NOT_ADMIN: Web deployment task failed. 
(Connected to 'dev.domain.com' using the Web Deployment Agent Service, but could not authorize. Make sure you are an administrator on 'dev.domain.com'. 

The Ci profile contains a username and password that works when I run the publishing from Visual Studio on my machine. I have also tried passing in username and password as parameters in the build step, but I get the same result. Do I need to run the TeamCity services under admin accounts to get this working? All suggestions are appreciated.

Answer 1

I have just blogged about this at http://sedodream.com/2013/01/06/CommandLineWebProjectPublishing.aspx.

You are pretty close, hopefully I can close the gap.

You are correct that username and password are specified in the VS publish dialog, but we do not save the password in the .pubxml file. It is currently being saved in the .pubxml.user file, and that file is not used at all for command line scenarios. Because of that you will need to pass in the property. So in your case it should be

msbuild .\src\solution.sln /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=ci /p:Password=<insert-password>

If your web server does not have trusted certs you may need to also pass in /p:AllowUntrustedCertificate=true.

One little addition which may not be directly related to your issue, but may be helpful for others which may see this later. If you are building the .csproj/.vbproj file (and potentially in some scenarios where the .sln file is used) you should pass in the property /p:VisualStudioVersion=11.0. More info on this available at my blog http://sedodream.com/2012/08/19/VisualStudioProjectCompatabilityAndVisualStudioVersion.aspx