Error publishing NET core app in Azure Devops YAML Build

Posted on One min read

Short story, I’ve created a simple YAML build for a.NET core project where one of the task will publish a simple.NET core console application. After running the build I’ve a strange error in the output

No web project was found in the repository. Web projects are identified by presence of either a web.config file or wwwroot folder in the directory.

This is extremely strange, because the project is not a web project, it is a standard console application written for.NET core 2.2 so I do not understand why it is searching a web.config file.

Then I decided to create a standard non YAML build, and when I dropped the task on the build I immediately understood the problem. This happens because dotnet core task with command publish is assuming by default that a web application is going to be published.

image

Figure 1: Default value for the dotnet publish command is to publish Web Project

Since I’ve no Web Project to publish Iimmediately change  my YAML definition to explicitly set to False the publishWebProjectsproperty.

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  - task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
    displayName:.NET Core Publish
    inputs:
      command: publish
      projects: '$(serviceProject)'
      arguments: '--output $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)'
      configuration: $(BuildConfiguration)
      workingDirectory: $(serviceProjectDir)
      publishWebProjects: False
      zipAfterPublish: true

And the build was fixed.

Gian Maria.