Publishing/Deploying Orchard CMS 1.8 with Visual S

Question

I am new to Orchard 1.8 and have developed a website using Visual Studio Premium 2013 Version 12.0.21005.1 (with the .NET 4.5.51641 Framework) and I need to know how to Publish/Deploy an Orchard website from a local desktop development box to an in-house "production" machine that has Windows Server 21012 R2, and IIS 8.5.

The development version of the site (on my local machine) uses SQL Server 2012 SP1 as the database.

How do I Publish/Deploy to the in-house "production" machine that has: Windows Server 21012 R2, and IIS 8.5 and specify another "production" database (which will need the data from the development version transferred to it)?

I am also new to publishing/deploying using VS. I would like to use "File System" as the Publish method, if possible.

Any detailed steps/instructions on how to do this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You're right about needing to change settings.txt not web.config for the database connection string.

For the remaining steps, this answer assumes that you're developing from the Orchard Source, so you can run build precompiled from a developer command prompt. Here is an overview of the steps:

1. Configure IIS 8.5 on the server the same way that you configured it on your local desktop. You'll need to configure the application pools, for instance, and also make sure you have ASP.NET enabled.
2. Backup your local database and restore it on the production SQL Server. You will also need to configure security for the application pool.
3. Make a precompiled build of your Orchard CMS.
4. Make a new website in IIS on your production server.
5. Copy and paste the build results from step 3 into the root directly of the website from step 4. Set all the Access Control permissions for App_Data, Media, Themes, and Modules, as needed.
6. Change the settings.txt file to point at the new database.

You will be good to go unless you face some gotchas. You might also need to bring access your Media folder, if it contains images or other static resources to which your site links, and maybe your Theme too.