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Running web deploy from the command line: some useful commands

I talked about Web Deploy before. It allows you to easily deploy your web applications to IIS without much overhead. I use it most of the time. Last week I asked the server administrator to enable the automatic backup feature on the web server. 

Once I got the confirmation email that it was configured, I did a new deployment to test the backup feature.

After the deployment completed succesfully, I opened a command prompt and browsed to C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy V3.

Print the list of backups

I used the following command to dump the list of created backups:

msdeploy -verb:dump -source:backupManager="development.customer.be/appname",computerName="serverXX",userName="UserXYZ",password="PasswordXYZ"

But the output window returned nothing. No backups were created.

Print the backup settings

I switched to another command to dump the backupSettings from the server:

msdeploy -verb:dump -source:backupSettings="development.customer.be/appname",computerName="serverXX",userName="UserXYZ",password="PasswordXYZ"

This time I got some information back:

Info: Using ID '5263eab5-358c-4f3a-9d65-b60f2bade089' for connections to the remote server.

MSDeploy.backupSettings development.customer.be/appname

MSDeploy.backupSettings/backupSettings[@path=’development.customer.be/appname']/backupSetting[@turnedOn='False']

MSDeploy.backupSettings/backupSettings[@path='development.customer.be/appname]/backupSetting[@enabled='True']

MSDeploy.backupSettings/backupSettings[@path='development.customer.be/appname']/backupSetting[@numberOfBackups='4']

MSDeploy.backupSettings/backupSettings[@path='development.customer.be/appname']/backupSetting[@continueSyncOnBackupFailure='True']

MSDeploy.backupSettings/backupSettings[@path='development.customer.be/appname']/backupSetting[@excludedProviders='appPoolEnable32Bit; setAcl; appPoolPipeline; createApp; appHostAuthOverride; appPoolNetFx']

There are 2 important things I noticed in the config:

  • The Backup feature is enabled at the site level.
  • The Backup feature is turned off in IIS.

So that explains why we don’t see a backup. We still have to turn on the backup feature.

Turn on backups on the server

Log on to the webserver and execute the following Powershell command:

PS C:\Program Files\iis\Microsoft Web Deploy V3\scripts> TurnOn-Backups -On $true

11:43:53        Information     Turning Backup Feature On.  In order for backups to execute, they still need to be enabled at either the server or site level.

After doing this I did a new deploy. Let’s dump the list of packages again:

msdeploy -verb:dump -source:backupManager="development.customer.be/appname",computerName="serverXX",userName="UserXYZ",password="PasswordXYZ"

This time I got some data back:

Info: Using ID '7b36c65f-fcf1-48e7-a26b-16f8438473ae' for connections to the remote server.

MSDeploy.backupManager development.customer.be/appname

msdeploy_2013_03_15_11_17_34.zip

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