I’ve now seen several questions on StackOverflow about changing the physical path of an IIS site/app using MSDeploy. So I figured this may be helpful for others.
I believe MSDeploy can set the physical path using the appHostConfig provider but it didn’t look straight forward. After thinking through this further I decided the runCommand provider would probably be more simple/flexible for most use cases. Here is a manifest snippet you could use (or you could also extend WebDeploy via MSBuild in a similar way – see https://www.dotnetcatch.com/2016/05/19/extending-the-webdeploy-manifest/):
<runcommand path="%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set app /app.name:"Default Web Site/app12" /[path='/'].physicalPath:C:\temp\app12" waitInterval="5000"/>
Here we are calling appcmd which is provided with IIS to configure sites/apps via the commandline. And here is the result in the context of an actual MSDeploy deployment:
Info: Updating runCommand (%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set app /app.name:"Default Web Site/app12" /[path='/'].physicalPath:C:\temp\app12). Info: APP object "Default Web Site/app12" changed Warning: The process 'C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe' (command line '') exited with code '0x0'. Total changes: 1 (0 added, 0 deleted, 1 updated, 0 parameters changed, 0 bytes copied)
The path value may change depending on your site/app setup. You can use the following command to find the appropriate path:
>%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd list app /app.name:"Default Web Site/app12" /config <application path="/app12" applicationPool="DefaultAppPool"> <virtualDirectoryDefaults /> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\temp\app12" /> </application>
Hope this helps others. If so, please let me know in the comments below or on Twitter (@chief7).