Publish Site before Hosting

[georgehemmings]

SpecsForMvc (http://specsfor.com/SpecsForMvc/features.cshtml) handles hosting slightly differently to Seleno. It publishes the site and then uses IIS Express to host the published copy, rather than just hosting the project path. Among other things, this means that any Web.config transforms are applied to the host version. This is useful for acceptance testing, as connection strings and other configuration different can be applied.

I think it would be good for Seleno to adopt this approach. What do you think?

[robdmoore]

Completely agree we should provide this as an option. It's something we've discussed previously and is roughly on our backlog (but not prioritised). It would be easy for you to implement a custom IWebServer and plug it in using the AppConfiguration. If you need this before we get around to it feel free to submit what you come up with as a pull request :)

[georgehemmings]

Awesome. I'll look into it.

[robdmoore]

I've written web deploy code before in c# if you need help hit me up at: me [at] robdmoore [dot] id [dot] au

[mwhelan]

I think it would be really useful to be able to use web.config transforms too. @robdmoore , I'd be interested what you think the best approach is, as there seem a few possibilities. This is not really my strong area so forgive me for any wildly inaccurate statements here... :-)

I know you can do it with msbuild but I think that can be problematic - it's required to be installed and can be unpredictable by version I think.

The Microsoft Xml Document Transformation library is available as a NuGet package. Perhaps that would be better to use?
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Web.Xdt/

Are publish profiles a good way to go?

Without further investigation, I don't think we need a new IWebServer implementation. I think that if a web.config transform is specified in the configuration then we publish to a new folder. If not, we point to the project folder as we currently do. Everything else stays the same, it's just the location of the deployment folder that changes.

[robdmoore]

The only problem with doing it auto-magically is where do we publish the site to? Should we expect the user to have to specify that or not?

I guess to keep with Seleno's style of making everything really easy we probably should just take care of it. Maybe we can request a temp directory folder and publish to that? Then there is the issue of trying to clean up after ourselves so the HDD doesn't fill up. Alternatively, we could publish into the same subfolder every time in the location the current tests are running (perhaps the project name so if there are multiple tests running from the same directory then they won't trample on each other).

Do we copy the files and then use Microsoft.Web.Xdt (it's good, I've used that before) to do the transform, or do we use web deploy? Thing is we will be probably copying more than we need since we aren't hooking in to the project to grab just the content files. An alternative approach would be to use msbuild and web deploy via that (I wouldn't both with publish profiles). That would have the added bonus of definitely making sure the web project is built, but would also restrict us to having a .csproj etc. file.

[kasparkallas]

What's the progress on this? :) Is there any way to specify a Web.config transformation in Seleno at the moment?