BitLoop Blog

On-premise deployments with Azure DevOps – Web Applications

This is the fourth post on this topic. The entire series consists of these posts:


This post will cover how a web application can be deployed into IIS inside a task group, which can be used across multiple stages inside a multi-environment release.

Task Group

1. The first task group creates a backup of the project. See Part 2 of this series for details

2. The second task creates or updates an IIS Website. There are many options for this task, like adding bindings, creating application pool, authentication. Here is an example:

3. The third task creates an IIS web application (virtual path) under the IIS Website created in the previous task.

Notes

4. The fourth task replaces environment specific settings using release variables. This is done using the Magic Chunks extension that can be installed into DevOps. In Part 2 of this series, the extension was used to replace values in a JSON config file, but it can also be used with XML files.

In this case, the task replaces SMTP settings, but it can be used with any type of XML file.

5. The fifth task is the one that does the actual deployment into the IIS Web Application created in step 3.

If there is a single project to be deployed, the Virtual Application field can be left empty, in which case the deployment will be made into the IIS Website.

Notes