How to Deploy a .Net web app to Azure using Powershell - powershell

Question

I have a "Web app" in Azure to which I deploy/publish a .Net web application using Visual Studio. (Build --> Publish), and it works.
I want to be able to deploy/publish my application using a Powershell script. I got the following script to work for the build portion:
CMD> "c:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\bin\msbuild.exe" WebApplication1.sln
To make it also deploy, I need to add a few parameters:
CMD> "c:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\bin\msbuild.exe" WebApplication1.sln /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile="C:\Users\jgodse\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\WebApplication1\WebApplication1\Properties\PublishProfiles\jg-7-web-app-1 - Web Deploy.pubxml" /p:Configuration=Release
I got an error:
Build FAILED.
"c:\Users\jgodse\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\WebApplication1\WebApplication1.sln" (default target) (1) ->
"c:\Users\jgodse\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\WebApplication1\WebApplication1\WebApplication1.csproj" (default target) (2) ->
(MSDeployPublish target) ->
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v14.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets(4295,5): msdeploy error ERROR_USER_UNAUTHORIZED: Web deployment task failed. (Connected to the remote computer ("jg-7-web-app-1.scm.azurewebsites.net") using the Web Management Service, but could not authorize. Make sure that you are using the correct user name and password, that the site you are connecting to exists, and that the credentials represent a user who has permissions to access the site. Learn more at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=221672#ERROR_USER_UNAUTHORIZED.) [c:\Users\jgodse\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\WebApplication1\WebApplication1\WebApplication1.csproj]
0 Warning(s)
1 Error(s)
I am obviously missing my Azure credentials (seeing as Visual Studio was able to capture them), and I am also not running in Powershell.
So I took the entire command and put it into a file called deploy.bat, opened up a Powershell window and did the following:
PS> Login-AzureRmAccount
(I typed in my user/password in the GUI popup).
PS> cmd /c .\deploy.bat
The build was fine, but I got the same error when trying to publish. I guess that the Azure credentials did not carry through when shelling out to the CMD program.
How do I use Powershell to call MSBuild on my .Net project to publish to an Azure web app?

Answer 1

You can use your existing .pubxml file but you need the password in order to be able to deploy. There are several ways to get it. The most obvious one is to get it from the portal by navigating to the blade of you Web app and then clicking on "More" and finally on "Get publish profile"
This file contains all sorts of data but the one that you need is called userPWD - this is the password that you need to use. Copy the password and add it to your MsBuild command:
CMD> "c:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\bin\msbuild.exe" WebApplication1.sln /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile="C:\Users\jgodse\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\WebApplication1\WebApplication1\Properties\PublishProfiles\jg-7-web-app-1 - Web Deploy.pubxml" /p:Configuration=Release /p:Password="Value of userPWD"
Obviously storing this value in your build scripts is not recommended. What you could do is download the publish settings using Powershell (Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile), extract the userPWD value, pass it to MsBuild to publish your app, and finally clean everything up.
There are various ways to implement you build infrastructure and what I have proposed might not be the best solution for you but it is up to you to experiment and decide what works best for you.
Some resources:
Automate Everything (Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Azure) - This one uses ASM instead of Resource Manager but you can easily tweak it to use ARM
Using Windows PowerShell scripts to publish to dev and test environments
Hope this helps.