Deploying an Umbraco site using Visual Studio

Question

I'm almost finished with my first Umbraco site and i've been looking through these forums as well as the ourumbraco.org forums to try and find a definitive guide as to how to publish an Umbraco site to a live staging area however, as I have found so far, such a guide does not exist. In particular, I am interested in how an Umbraco site developed using Visual Studio can be deployed and which folders can be removed/streamlined for a production environment. I am using the latest version of Umbraco 7.3.1 and a SQL CE database.

I'm happy to use FTP to upload the site to the server if that is an option but I also want to ensure that my site has the basic level of out of the box Umbraco security so I am assuming things like the installation directory should be removed.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. I am using Visual Studio 2013.

Narayan

Answer 1

The answer really depends on how you have set up the project - as if you exclude the umbraco core files (which you have to else they will not compile) Then you will need to include them again in your publish script.

As far as the deployment - I typically include all the folders - including the install folder, but I zip that folder and delete the files. The reason being that the install folder is sometimes used during upgrades if you change databases - and as you are using sqlce you may switch to a full SQL db one day

---

ADDITION:

My deploy folder finally looks like the following

Directory of E:\Work\Umbraco\deploy

17/06/2014  12:04    <DIR>          .
17/06/2014  12:04    <DIR>          ..
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          App_Browsers
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          App_Plugins
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          bin
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          config
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          css
08/05/2014  23:11               152 default.aspx
08/05/2014  23:11               107 Global.asax
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          macroScripts
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          masterpages
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          media
08/05/2014  23:11             1,954 packages.config
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          scripts
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          umbraco
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          umbraco_client
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          usercontrols
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          Views
17/06/2014  11:59            15,585 Web.config
17/06/2014  11:59    <DIR>          xslt

Benefic

I setup the project using the Umbraco CMS NuGet package. Could you explain the process you follow in more detail? For the moment we are pretty much set on using SQLCE as this will be a relatively small scale brochure site. – Narayan

That's great - in that case you've probably got the simplest procedure. The standard publish out of VS2013 should give you a working folder with the connectionstrings and any config transforms already done which means that's basically what you deploy. It won't include the install folder by default but as you won't be changing DBs, that's fine. You can publish to a local folder or to FTP, or if you're hosting on Azure, straight up there and it should work. When using the nuget package, the publish result is basically everything you need. – Benefic

The only reason I ask is I've seen a lot of people on the Umbraco forums stating that this method doesn't work. – Narayan

It's worked fairly reliably for me - but if you see any issues I'm usually on SO so drop me a comment and I can try to help. Do you know what sort of issues people see? – Benefic

I can confirm this method worked for me through VS2017. You simply need to know what files to include before you publish out. – Advocaat