Manage web deployment settings

You can control how your web application gets deployed using the settings.

Prerequisite

Visual Studio with the Web Development workload installed.

Manage settings

The Show all settings link appears after you run the Publish wizard to create a publish profile. The settings vary according to the type of deployment.

To view or change the settings, select the Show all settings link, or click on any of the pencil icons. The Settings page appears.

  1. Click on the Settings link. The Settings screen opens.
  2. The Prev button takes you to the previous screen with settings you can edit for some deployment types.
  3. Expand the File Publish Options to view settings that relate to files that might already be on the site.
  4. Expand the Database settings to view the database connection information, which can be different from what your app uses when running locally during development and testing.

The following table describes the settings. Click on the links for more information.

Name Profile types Property Description
Configuration Folder, IIS LastUsedBuildConfiguration The project build configuration to deploy, for example, Release.
TargetFramework Folder, IIS TargetFramework The version of .NET that the app is targeted to run on. This is already set by the project, but you can change it for deployment.
Deployment mode Folder, IIS none or SelfContained You can choose framework-dependent if you can depend on the runtime being available, or self-contained if you want to package the runtime with the application's publish artifacts.
Target Runtime Folder, IIS The .NET Runtime ID (RID) for this deployment.
Server IIS MSDeployServiceURL The web server name, URI, or IP address. For example, localhost.
Site name IIS Site The site name in IIS, for example, Default Web Site.
Username IIS UserName The username you will use to access the site in IIS.
Password IIS UserPWD The first time you publish, you create a password that you will use to publish the site. The password can't be changed in Visual Studio, but it can be changed in IIS or in Azure. If you don't know the password, you can get it by downloading the .publishsettings file. See Import publish settings from IIS and Import publish settings from Azure.
Save password checkbox IIS _SavePWD If checked, saves the password as plain text in the .pubxml file.
Destination URL IIS SiteURLToLaunchAfterPublish The URL that launches the app, for example, http://localhost/projectname. If the IIS configuration for the web site exposes the site on a specific port in its bindings settings, include that as in http://localhost:nnnn/projectname. This is optional and only provides a convenient link on the Publish page, and is used to launch the site after a successful publish.
Enable ReadyToRun compilation Folder PublishReadyToRun ReadyToRun is a form of Ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation. It can reduce latency by avoiding Just-in-time (JIT) compilation at runtime.
Trim unused code Folder PublishTrimmed Minimizes the size of a self-contained deployment.
Produce single file Folder PublishSingleFile An option that allows the published application to be distributed in a single file.
Remove additional files at destination IIS SkipExtraFilesOnServer To preserve added files, uncheck the box.
Delete all existing files prior to publish. FTP DeleteExistingFiles Uncheck this to preserve unrelated files at the destination, or check this to start with a clean deployment to the folder.
Package location IIS WebDeploy Package DesktopBuildPackageLocation A local filesystem path to place the output package.

Next steps

The settings are persisted in the .pubxml file. The .pubxml file is an MSBuild input file. You can edit the file to further customize the deployment. See MSBuild.

Visual Studio .pubxml files