msdeploy/Web Deployment Tool deploying too many files

Question

Hi,

We're using msdeploy to deploy our sites to various environments from our continuous integration server.

When the artifacts are deployed manually to the dev site from the command line. The deployment only pushes changed files and is very quick.

However, when we push to our test or live environments the deployment copies a lot of files which should not have changed. My understanding is that msdeploy compares based on timestamps, sizes and attributes which shouldn't have changed.

We can see using the -whatif switch that a lot of files are being reported as needed to be changed when in fact they haven't. Specifically the umbraco core files (this is an umbraco web site).

Anyone run into this before?

Our only thoughts are to exclude as much as possible from the artifacts of the build but we'd prefer to fix it properly.

Cheers, Rob

Answer 1

This turned out to be a problem where the server time was slightly different to our network time.

Adding the following to the commandline has fixed it.

-enableRule:SkipNewerFilesRule