Customizing deployments

When deploying a git repository via Kudu, the rules for picking a specific project are as follows:

1. If there's a .deployment file at the root of the repository go to step 4, otherwise go to the next step.
2. Scan for solution files, if there's multiple solutions, fail, if there's 1 solution file go to next step, if none, go to step 6.
3. Now that we have a solution, pick the first website or WAP in that solution and deploy it, if there's none, then fail.
4. Find the target project file, if there's multiple projects, fail, if there's 1 project file, deploy it, otherwise go to next step.
5. look for a website project in the specified folder (by finding a solution that has a website with the same path), if more than one, fail, otherwise deploy the website project.
6. Find the target WAP, if there's none then Xcopy deploy all the repository files (excluding .git and .hg) to the web root.

.deployment file

Deployment configuration files let you override the default heuristics of deployment by allowing you to specify a project or folder to be deployed. It has to be at the root of the repository and it's in .ini format. Here are some examples:

Deploying a specific ASP.NET project file (i.e. a WAP)

You can specify the full path to the project file. Note that this is not a path to the solution file (.sln), but to the project file (.csproj/.vbproj). The reason for this is that Kudu only builds the minimal dependency tree for this project, and avoids building unrelated projects in the solution that are not needed by the web project.

Here is an example:

[config]
project = WebProject/WebProject.csproj

Or simply the folder that the project file is in, assuming there is only one. e.g.

[config]
project = WebProject

Deploying a specific folder for a Node, PHP, or ASP.NET site

If the folder you want to deploy is not the root of the repository, you can specify which folder to deploy. e.g.

[config]
project = MyWebRoot

In case you have a solution/project file in your repository but you want it to be ignored and have your full repo deployed as a web site, you can use the following (e.g. Orchard use this):

[config]
project = .

Using App Settings instead of a .deployment file

One downside of using a .deployment file is that it is committed to the repo, and sometimes you want to make that selection outside of the repo.

Let's say that you have one repo that contains two different ASP.NET projects (possibly in the same solution), which you want to deploy to different sites. You couldn't use a .deployment file here, as it can only point to one project.

Instead, you can use App Settings to set the same values that are supported in the .deployment file. The steps are:

• Go to the Configure tab for you site in the Azure portal
• Add an App Setting called Project, and set its value to something like WebProject/WebProject.csproj
• Then in your other web site you can set Project to point to a different .csproj file.