In the second part of this series of blog posts I will describe what is required to deploy a Sitecore solution into the content editing environment using Visual Studio and how it can be setup.
Prerequisites
- Visual Studio 2013 (older versions should work too)
- Windows Azure SDK 2.5 (some of the older versions would work too)
- Windows Azure Powershell
- MSBuild.ExtensionPack
- Archive of Sitecore 7.2 site root from the SDN
- Sitecore databases deployed in SQL Azure
- Azure Storage Explorer
- Azure storage account
Deployment Process
The following steps will be executed when the Publish option from the Visual Studio Azure Cloud Service project is invoked:
- Compile source code using the ContentEditing build configuration
- Transform configuration files
e.g. web.config, connectionStrings.config… - Extract archive of Sitecore 7.2 site root’s Website folder into web application temporary publishing folder
- Publish web application to temporary publishing folder
- Create Azure deployment package
- Upload Azure deployment package
- Deploy package
Since the Sitecore folder in the Website folder only contains Sitecore content editing related files that should not be changed I recommend to exclude this folder from being packaged and uploaded with each and every deployment package. The Sitecore folder alone is over 130 MB zipped and slows down the deployment process considerably. Instead the deployment setup below suggests to upload a zipped archive to the blob storage and extract that archive on role startup into the application folder on each web role.
Continue reading “Sitecore Azure deployment using Visual Studio Cloud Service project – Part 2”