Sdk: Publish to Zip File

[normj]

I'm constantly hitting the windows max path length error. I can get around it by setting the output folder for publish to somewhere under c:\temp but that is awkward for tooling's point of view. I was thinking it would be useful to have the ability for publish to write straight to a zip file instead of a folder structure. This avoids the max path length error and I'm betting the next step after publish is normally zip and send the app somewhere.

I'm happy to send a pull request if this is something the cli team would use.

[TheRealPiotrP]

@normj this sounds like a cool extension to add. I would suggest waiting until we finish the move to MSBuild as I would imagine folks wanting to wire this in as a Task/Target. There's no need to ship this from the CLI repo since folks can get extensions from NuGet packages. Let us know if we can help!

[RehanSaeed]

Please also consider publishing to a nupkg file. The two scenarios I think this would greatly help with are:

Continuous Integration

This would be particularly useful for continuous integration scenarios where artifacts need to be published somewhere. A zip file is ok but a NuGet package would contain the name, version, description, _release notes_ and other metadata for that particular build of the application.

Being able to differentiate and see the differences between different builds of the app is a killer feature in my opinion.

Octopus Deploy

For anyone using Octopus Deploy, it contains the octo pack tool which when used with ASP.NET Core, is used to package the published output into a nupkg. This feature would make the octo pack tool redundant.

[blackdwarf]

@RehanSaeed there is a dotnet pack command that you can use for this scenario.

[RehanSaeed]

@blackdwarf dotnet pack does not contain the entire published output. It only contains the compiled project DLL.

[blackdwarf]

@RehanSaeed ah, sorry, missed that part. :) Have you tried playing with packOptions and seeing if that helps you?

[RehanSaeed]

packOptions would work for loose content like views but not reference assemblies or native OS specific runtime DLL's.