I am trying to create a release pipeline in Azure DevOps. We already have a functioning build pipeline that works well, it is able to package the build with VSBuild and publish it as an artifact. Then in the release pipeline I am using an IIS Deployment job (which includes IIS Manage and IIS Deploy tasks) and it gets that artifact to deploy.
The problem is that we already have a publish profile (.pubxml) that should take care of pretty much everything the IIS Deployment is doing (at least as far I as I understand it). So to me it seems I have two options that don't require me to refactor the project configuration itself.
- I can try to mimic the settings on the IIS Deployment job to match our .pubxml as closely as possible and manually applying any changes that aren't doable through the task settings. Obviously this is not ideal as that would require us to update both when ever we make changes and it introduces a large chance of the pipeline breaking down over time.
- I can scrap the idea of using IIS Deployment and just use a VSBuild task that uses arguments
/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=Staging
. This doesn't seem like best practices because it means my release pipeline isn't passing a build package to deploy, it is just creating a new one at each stage.
So is there a better option that would allow me to utilize the package I created with VSBuild and the .pubxml configuration together in a deploy? If that isn't possible then are either of my options the "correct" way to handle my situation or am I just missing another method of deployment I could use?
Thank you for any help or insight you can provide. Please let me know if there is any more information I can give that would be useful.