Prevent Zipping in VSBuild task in Azure DevOps - azure-devops

Question

I would like to copy Angular UI dist folder content into published content, specifically wwwroot when using VSbuild task as shown below
- task: VSBuild#1
inputs:
solution: '$(solution)'
msbuildArgs: '/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:WebPublishMethod=Package /p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true /p:PackageLocation="$(build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)"'
platform: '$(buildPlatform)'
configuration: '$(buildConfiguration)'
My two questions are
whether this task is responsible for publish that we do manually in Visual Studio, and hence can I expect wwwroot folder to be present in the corresponding target location?
How do I say zip : false in the above command so that I can copy the required content and then zip later?
Thanks,
AK

Answer 1

whether this task is responsible for publish that we do manually in Visual Studio, and hence can I expect wwwroot folder to be present in the corresponding target location?
Yes. You can use msbuild arguments to do this:
msbuildArgs: '/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:DeployDefaultTarget=WebPublish /p:WebPublishMethod=FileSystem /p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true /p:DeleteExistingFiles=True /p:publishUrl="$(build.artifactStagingDirectory)"'
Use /p:WebPublishMethod=FileSystem to output the results as files, not a zip. Use /p:publishUrl={target location} to specify the output location.
How do I copy the required content and then zip later?
Add the following script to your .csproj file:
<ItemGroup>
<None Update="wwwroot\**" CopyToOutputDirectory="drop" />
</ItemGroup>