Quick Tip – Including Empty Directory While Deploying a Web Application
Quick Tip – Including Empty Directory While Deploying a Web Application
During this week I had to deploy an ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to a host environment using web deploy. The problem I faced was the deployment of an empty directory which is being used by the application. By design, when using web deploy tool in Visual Studio it skips empty directories when packaging a web application.
So How can you deploy this empty directory and overcome this problem?
The solution is to put an empty stub file in the directory you want to deploy.
Just create an empty text file in the directory and Visual Studio will deploy the directory.
Just to share a thought - This solution is a workaround to a Visual Studio problem which IMHO need to be solved. If a developer is adding an empty directory, VS need to give him/her the ability to choose whether to deploy it or not and not to omit the directory from the deployment package.