Passing MSBuild Arguments to Cake Build Script to produce _PublishedWebsites

Question

I am currentlly in the process of writing a Cake build script to build a number of ASP.NET MVC sites.

At the moment I am unable to see an option to pass arguments to MSBuild to produce the _PublishedWebsites folder for deployment.

I believe the arguments that I need to pass are:

/p:OutDir=$(build.stagingDirectory)
/p:DeployOnBuild=true
/p:WebPublishMethod=Package
/p:PackageAsSingleFile=true 
/p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true 

If there is an alternative approach which produces the same output content just not in the same folder directory that would be fine.

Answer 1

The following example should set the correct MSBuild properties when building your website solution from Cake.

MSBuild("./src/Website.sln", new MSBuildSettings()
  .WithProperty("OutDir", "$(build.stagingDirectory)")
  .WithProperty("DeployOnBuild", "true")
  .WithProperty("WebPublishMethod", "Package")
  .WithProperty("PackageAsSingleFile", "true")
  .WithProperty("SkipInvalidConfigurations", "true"));

To set the output directory of the website, simply swap out the "$(build.stagingDirectory)" part with the path to the directory where you want the output to appear.

You can read more about the MSBuild alias in Cake here: http://cakebuild.net/api/cake.common.tools.msbuild/