At one of my customers, everything is still on premise hosted on multiple IIS web servers. To deploy web applications, we are using Web Deploy. This works quite nicely and allows us to deploy web application in an automated way.
Last week, a colleague contacted me after configuring the deployment pipeline in Azure DevOps. When the pipeline tried to deploy the application, it failed with the following error message:
"System.Exception: Error: Source does not support parameter called 'IIS Web Application Name'. Must be one of (Environment)"
Here is a more complete build log to get some extra context:
Starting deployment of IIS Web Deploy Package : \DevDrop\BOSS.Intern.Web.zip">\DevDrop\BOSS.Intern.Web.zip">\DevDrop\BOSS.Intern.Web.zip">\DevDrop\BOSS.Intern.Web.zip">\\<servername>\DevDrop\BOSS.Intern.Web.zip
Performing deployment in parallel on all the machines.
Deployment started for machine: <servername> with port 5985.
Deployment status for machine <servername>: Failed
Deployment failed on machine <servername> with following message : System.Exception: Error: Source does not support parameter called 'IIS Web Application Name'. Must be one of (Environment).Error count: 1.ScriptHalted
##[error]Deployment on one or more machines failed. System.Exception: Error: Source does not support parameter called 'IIS Web Application Name'. Must be one of (Environment).Error count: 1.ScriptHalted
For more info please refer to http://aka.ms/iisextnreadme
Finishing: Deploy package BOSS.Intern.Web to Snapp2 BOSS dev
The exception occurred while executing the following deployment step:
There seems to be nothing wrong with the deployment step above and if I compared it with other projects there wasn’t any difference.
So maybe the problem could be found in the construction of the web deploy package?
Web Deploy expect some parameters to be available that will be replaced during the deployment of the package. Maybe something went wrong there.
Here is the pipeline step that was used to build the web deploy package:
The code above will build the web application and output the build results in a specific folder. The results of this folder are zipped but that doesn’t mean that we now have a deployable web deploy package. Therefore some parameters are missing. Let’s update the pipeline to correctly create a web deploy package.
Here is the updated step:
If we now run the pipeline, we could see in the logs that the mentioned parameter is added:
Info: Adding declared parameter 'IIS Web Application Name'.
Info: Adding declared parameter 'Environment'.
Total changes: 307 (305 added, 0 deleted, 0 updated, 2 parameters changed, 49116855 bytes copied)
Package "BOSS.Intern.Web.zip" is successfully created as single file at the following location
Fixed!