Application Pool not set when deploying msdeploy iisApp package

msdeployweb-deployment

I'm having an issue with msdeploy not syncing application pool information for a sub application of a site (Default Web Site for example).

Essentially I was hoping I could create webdeploy/msdeploy packages as part of a nightly build process of multiple development branches and then deploy these branch-specific packages to a server for smoke testing. All seems plausible but unfortunately I cannot find a way to set the app pool that the deployed package's iisApp is intended to use. I can create and deploy packages that contain appPoolConfig providers to support the creation of the app pool itself but this is useless if I cannot set the app pool on the application I'm deploying.

By the way, I feel like I'm almost reiterating other questions that appear to be similar. Various answers are given for using appPoolconfig or appPoolExtension but I've had no luck with these. From my reading appPoolConfig is used to sync app pools themselves not the app pool "assigned" to an application. Incidentally, this type of sync operation works well. And as for appPoolExtension I'm at a loss as to what it actually does when it is switched on as I see no difference in the generated package.

I can recreate the problem using a simple set of steps that uses msdeploy only with no WPP/webdeploy/msbuild in the way with the intention that it should work with the lowest level tool alone:

Windows 8 (note: I can replicate the issue on Win 2008 R2 also), IIS and Web Deploy 3.0 installed.

Assuming a Default Web Site exists and .NET 4.0 is installed, create a new application pool called TestPool.
Create a new application called TestApp under Default Web Site and assign its application pool to the TestPool created in step 1.
Open command prompt with path access to msdeploy.

Type >

msdeploy -verb:sync -source:iisApp="Default Web Site/TestApp" -dest:package=c:\temp\testapp.zip,encryptPassword="password" -enableLink:AppPoolExtension

Now that we have a package we can delete TestApp from under the Default Web Site and delete any remaining physical folder created as part of the initiall application creation.

Assuming we still have the TestPool application pool configured in IIS as an available pool, type >

msdeploy -verb:sync -source:c:\temp\testapp.zip,encryptPassword="password" -dest:iisApp="Default Web Site/TestApp" -enableLink:AppPoolExtension

Go to IIS Manager and select our TestApp under Default Web Site. Click Basic Settings… and the Application Pool is not the required TestPool but instead is the default pool set for the Default Web Site.

Any help is appreciated.

EDIT:
Just ran a variation on the steps above and change the "iisApp" to "appHostConfig" in both msdeploy command lines and the app pool settings are retained so a success from an msdeploy point of view. However, if this is the solution, how does one inform the VS 2012 publish process to use appHostConfig rather than issApp?

EDIT:
In answer to my own edit this answer worked: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12741525/739097. This begs another question though about how one can integrate the package creation on a build server with no IIS but my thoughts here are that one would create a template package first based upon the required IIS settings, dynamic parameters, etc but essentially empty of content. The build process would then create a package of content only and sync this with the template package to create a final package for deployment.

Best Answer

Your question has become multi-faceted through your edits, but I'll tackle one thing at a time.

Only the appHostConfig provider can create global IIS objects like sites and application pools.

iisApp is simply a composite of createApp (can mark directories as an application) and contentPath (syncronises files/folders).

In order to package/sync an appHostConfig provider rather than an iisApp provider, you need to do two things:

Have your project file marked as using IIS with a valid URL (you can override the MSBuild file to examine for these properties by defining WebPublishPipelineWAPProjectSettings)
Declare a IncludeIisSettings=true in your publish profile

But, yes, this requires IIS to be installed on the build server (or, at least, for the build server to have access to the IIS instance). MSDeploy is, after all, a web synchronisation framework.

What you could potentially do is to have a package, generated manually, that contains your website definition and another, generated during build, that contains the content. Careful with this, though, as you might run into errors if the app pool contains advanced options and the package was not generated by the same version of IIS as the deployment target.

Related Solutions

Deployment issue of an web application using MSDeploy command

I ran into the same issue as you did. I solved it by only use site name in https://computername:8172/msdeploy.axd?site={websitenameonly}. Then set your webapplication path in the parameter using -setParam IIS Web Application Name= {your web application name here} or use a parameter file. And everything deployed fine.

It seems that the site querystring value is required to authorize the request only. I haven't find any definitive documentation from MS on any other querystring parameters that might solve this. But I actually tested 2 cases. 1) Deploying to a web site in IIS 7.5, this parameter is required. 2) Deploying to a web application under a web site, this parameter is actually optional, but if you want to include it, then it has to be a root site.

You actually answered your own question here just probably didn't realize it.

(MSDeploy) Deploying Contents of a Folder to a Remote IIS Server

I just wrote a blog post to answer this at http://sedodream.com/2012/08/20/WebDeployMSDeployHowToSyncAFolder.aspx. From your question it looks like you are pretty familiar with MSDeploy so the answer might be a bit verbose but I wanted people with less knowledge of MSDeploy to be able to understand. I've pasted the answer below.

Web Deploy (aka MSDeploy) uses a provider model and there are a good number of providers available out of the box. To give you an example of some of the providers; when syncing an IIS web application you will use iisApp, for an MSDeploy package you will use package, for a web server webServer, etc. If you want to sync a local folder to a remote IIS path then you can use the contentPath provider. You can also use this provider to sync a folder from one website to another website.

The general idea of what we want to do in this case is to sync a folder from your PC to your IIS website. Calls to msdeploy.exe can be a bit verbose so let’s construct the command one step at at time. We will use the template below.

msdeploy.exe -verb:sync -source:contentPath="" -dest:contentPath=""

We use the sync verb to describe what we are trying to do, and then use the contentPath provider for both the source and the dest. Now let’s fill in what those values should be. For the source value you will need to pass in the full path to the folder that you want to sync. In my case the files are at C:\temp\files-to-pub. For the dest value you will give the path to the folder as an IIS path. In my case the website that I’m syncing to is named sayedupdemo so the IIS path that I want to sync is ‘sayedupdemo/files-to-pub’. Now that give us.

msdeploy.exe –verb:sync -source:contentPath="C:\temp\files-to-pub" -dest:contentPath='sayedupdemo/files-to-pub'

For the dest value we have not given any parameters indicating what server those command are supposed to be sent to. We will need to add those parameters. The parameters which typically need to be passed in are.

ComputerName – this is the URL or computer name which will handle the publish operation
Username – the username
Password – the password
AuthType – the authType to be used. Either NTLM or Basic. For WMSvc this is typically Basic, for Remote Agent Service this is NTLM

In my case I’m publishing to a Windows Azure Web Site. So the values that I will use are:

ComputerName: https://waws-prod-blu-001.publish.azurewebsites.windows.net/msdeploy.axd?site=sayedupdemo
Username: $sayedupdemo
Password: thisIsNotMyRealPassword
AuthType: Basic

All of these values can be found in the .publishSettings file (can be downloaded from Web Site dashboard from WindowsAzure.com). For the ComputerName value you will need to append the name of your site to get the full URL. In the example above I manually added ?site=sayedupdemo, this is the same name as shown in the Azure portal. So now the command which we have is.

msdeploy.exe 
    –verb:sync 
    -source:contentPath="C:\temp\files-to-pub" 
    -dest:contentPath='sayedupdemo/files-to-pub'
            ,ComputerName="https://waws-prod-blu-001.publish.azurewebsites.windows.net/msdeploy.axd?site=sayedupdemo"
            ,UserName='$sayedupdemo'
            ,Password='thisIsNotMyRealPassword'
            ,AuthType='Basic'

OK we are almost there! In my case I want to make sure that I do not delete any files from the server during this process. So I will also add –enableRule:DoNotDeleteRule. So our command is now.

msdeploy.exe 
    –verb:sync 
    -source:contentPath="C:\temp\files-to-pub" 
    -dest:contentPath='sayedupdemo/files-to-pub'
            ,ComputerName="https://waws-prod-blu-001.publish.azurewebsites.windows.net/msdeploy.axd?site=sayedupdemo"
            ,UserName='$sayedupdemo'
            ,Password='thisIsNotMyRealPassword'
            ,AuthType='Basic' 
    -enableRule:DoNotDeleteRule

At this point before I execute this command I’ll first execute it passing –whatif. This will give me a summary of what operations will be without actually causing any changes. When I do this the result is shown in the image below.

msdeploy result

After I verified that the changes are all intentional, I removed the –whatif and executed the command. After that the local files were published to the remote server. Now that I have synced the files each publish after this will be result in only changed files being published.

If you want to learn how to snyc an individual file you can see my previous blog post How to take your web app offline during publishing.

dest:auto

In your case I noted that you were using dest:auto, you can use that but you will have to pass in the IIS app name as a parameter and it will replace the path to the folder. Below is the command.

msdeploy.exe 
    -verb:sync
    -source:contentPath="C:\temp\files-to-pub" 
    -dest:auto
        ,ComputerName="https://waws-prod-blu-001.publish.azurewebsites.windows.net/msdeploy.axd?site=sayedupdemo"
        ,UserName='$sayedupdemo'
        ,Password='thisIsNotMyRealPassword'
        ,AuthType='Basic' 
-enableRule:DoNotDeleteRule 
-setParam:value='sayedupdemo',kind=ProviderPath,scope=contentPath,match='^C:\\temp\\files-to-pub$'

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Deployment issue of an web application using MSDeploy command

(MSDeploy) Deploying Contents of a Folder to a Remote IIS Server

dest:auto

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