Azure Pipeline Publish: task DotNetCoreCLI with specific folder or project

Question

I'm having a problem (unwanted behavior) when running an Azure Build Pipeline with the following project/folder structure.

My repository's root folder has two main folders:

• frontend (ASP.Net Core 2.x & Angular 7 project)
• backend (ASP.Net Core 2.x)

I'm trying to build two separate Azure Pipelines one for the backend and one for the frontend, so I use the projects: parameter to specify the correct path.

The build and test commands are running fine and are only restoring/building/testing the backend folder, but the publish command is running for both folders: backend & frontend.

This is my yaml file:

 #build backend project
 task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
   displayName: dotnet build --configuration $(buildConfiguration)
   name: BuildBackendProject
   inputs:
     command: build
     projects: '**/backend/**/*.csproj'
     arguments: '--configuration $(buildConfiguration)'

 ... #run some tests

 #publish backend project
 task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
   displayName: dotnet publish backend --configuration $(buildConfiguration)
   name: PublishBackendProject
   inputs:
     command: publish
     projects: '**/backend/**/*.csproj'
     publishWebProjects: True
     arguments: '--configuration $(BuildConfiguration) --output 
     $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)/backend'
     zipAfterPublish: True

I tried different folder paths but it's always running two publish commands.

If I run locally in CMD dotnet publish backend (from repo's root folder) it works fine but apparently that doesn't work with the Azure Pipeline.

Any ideas or fixes greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The trick is in using the publishWebProjects/projects properties. Those are actually mutually exclusive. If the publishWebProjects is used, the projects property value is skipped.

From the documentation:

Publish Web Projects*: If true, the task will try to find the web projects in the repository and run the publish command on them. Web projects are identified by presence of either a web.config file or wwwroot folder in the directory.

So you could try the following code for publishing:

task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
  displayName: dotnet publish backend --configuration $(buildConfiguration)
  name: PublishBackendProject
  inputs:
    command: publish
    projects: '**/backend/**/*.csproj'
    publishWebProjects: false
    arguments: '--configuration $(BuildConfiguration) --output $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)/backend'
    zipAfterPublish: true