The other day I saw a question posted on StackOverflow (link to question below in resources section) asking if it was possible to update web.config using MSDeploy. I actually used a technique where I updated a single file in one of my previous posts at How to take your web app offline during publishing but it wasn’t called out too much. In any case I’ll show you how you can update a single file (in this case web.config) using MSDeploy.

You can use the contentPath provider to facilitate updating a single file. Using contentPath you can sync either a single file or an entire folder. You can also use IIS app paths to resolve where the file/folder resides. For example if I have a web.config file in a local folder named “C:\Data\Personal\My Repo\sayed-samples\UpdateWebConfig” and I want to update my IIS site UpdateWebCfg running in the Default Web Site on my folder I would use the command shown below.

%msdeploy% -verb:sync -source:contentPath="C:\Data\Personal\My Repo\sayed-samples\UpdateWebConfig\web.config" -dest:contentPath="Default Web Site/UpdateWebCfg/web.config"

From the command above you can see that I set the source content path to the local file and the dest content path using the IIS path {SiteName}/{AppName}/{file-path}. In this case I am updating a site running in IIS on my local machine. In order to update one that is running on a remote machine you will have to add ComputerName and possibly some other values to the –dest argument.

You can view the latest sources for this sample at my github repo, link is below.

 

Hope that helps!

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi – @SayedIHashimi

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