How to automate publishing .NET web applications

Question

There is a Visual Studio solution that has multiple web application projects. All of them are to be published to a common folder - D:\inetpub\wwwroot\FirstSite. Each project has a publish profile Local.pubxml which imports settings from a global publishsettings.xml, and I use the One-Click Publish feature to publish each project.

Now, I would like to automate this process, which will Rebuild the solution and on success, publish all the projects to the target folder.

I have managed to create a Console application using C#, which can build all the projects in a solution. But, unfortunately could only go that far, as I'm unable to figure out how to get started about the publishing.

I'm not looking for setting up a build server. Just want to save time publishing projects to local folders.
Can we achieve this in a console application, by passing parameters like 'solution path' & 'target folder path', so that it can work for any such solution with multiple projects. If not, are there any simple tools for this.

Answer 1

When you invoke msbuild for the solution build, you can pass

/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=Local /p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true

which will publish each project with the Local profile for you