How To Publish an ASP.NET Website from a Command Line

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 a LOT of time so thought I would share it.

Launch notepad and copy paste the code below 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 your site successfully!