TFS 2010 Build Publish via file system

Question

I've got a fairly large MVC2 project in TFS which gets built automatically on checkin (Continuous Integration)

At present, the fully built version is dumped on a network share on our dev IIS server. \\Server\wwwrootLatest

TFS of course creates lots of sub-folders since it's just doing a build, it isn't even aware that it's drop directory is a wwwroot.

This means that to actually USE the build, we need to go and manually create an IIS App which points at the appropriate directory - which defeats the whole object of the exercise.

When we do a manual publish to that server, we use "File System" as the method and just overwrite the files in the UNC share \\Server\wwwroot

(When publishing to other environments, we use full-on MSDeploy.)

What I'd like to do is convince TFS to do a "File system" publish after the build completes and duplicate what we do on a manual publish eg:

Drop directory is \\Server\Build which would result in something like \\Server\Build\Project\Date.Rev\

After that is complete, we want it to publish to \\Server\wwwrootLatest - we can then set up the App once which will always contain the latest version but will still have a full history if required.

The only examples I've been able to find use MSBuild commands in the build definition (fine) but all use MSDeploy to do a full-on publish. I'm not sure how to automate what I want to do

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

In your drop folder a folder named _PublishedWebsites is generated automatically. It contains files you need to put in wwwroot. You can use CopyDirectory build activity to copy them automatically.