Is it possible to modify web.config of existing site using MSDeploy?

Question

Is it possible to modify (or just replace) web.config of existing site using MSDeploy?

Answer 1

It's possible to replace certain sections (specified with an xPath query or regular expression) of the web config file. Use the -declareParam en -setParam commandline switches for that.

Like so

msdeploy -verb:sync -source:apphostconfig="Default Web Site" -dest:package=ParameterPackage.zip -declareParam:name=param,kind=XmlFile,scope=web.config,match=//add/@value 

or so:

msdeploy -verb:sync -source:package=ParameterPackage.zip -dest:auto -setParam:name=param,value=MyDefaultWebPage.htm

You can find more info here if you're using the command line.

If your working with importing and exporting packages in and from IIS you can create a parameters.xml file. Vishal Joshi has lots of good posts about how to use msdeploy (for example this)

Answer 2

Yes you can do this. I just posted a blog on this at http://sedodream.com/2012/02/14/HowToUpdateASingleFileUsingWebDeployMSDeploy.aspx but I'm also copying the content below for you.

The other day I saw a question posted on StackOverflow 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.