CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azuredeployment
user1039580
user1039580

Reputation: 369

Include referenced assembly's configuration in cspkg

I have an executable that I want to be deployed together with my Azure web role. The executable has a configuration file that needs to be included as well. I tried adding a reference to the executable's project in my web role project, which made the exe file appear in the bin folder of the cspkg, but not the configuration file. How can I get the configuration file to be included as well? It seems wrong to include it directly as a content file in the web role project because this file is a build artifact (app.config gets renamed to .config.exe during build).

Thanks!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 393

Answers (1)

MikeWo
MikeWo

Reputation: 10975

In an early SDK they added the concept of Role Content folders, or folders you could point to in the service definition file and say anything in this folder, add it to the package and deploy it with the role. If you look at the schema for the Service Definition you'll see these listed on the both the web and worker roles schemas. You can manually add this and point to any location on the local system and anything in that directory will be picked up and included. 

  <WebRole name="SimpleWeb" vmsize="Small">

    ...

    <Contents>
      <Content destination="ConsoleApp">
          <SourceDirectory path="c:\src\SimpleWebContent\ConsoleApp\BuildOutput" />
      </Content>
    </Contents>
  </WebRole>

For example, you could point to the output directory of the build for your executable so that anything that is generated by your build for that executable would be included. You can set the destination directory in relation to the app root, but the tricky part is the source directory. Note in my example above the full path is provided. The documentation says that you can use a relative path, but I tried many combinations and the behavior seemed very quirky. The complete path does work.

The VS SDK tools didn't expose this until SDK 1.7 and it's still not very good. Phil Hoff did a blog post on it called "Add Files to your Windows Azure Package using Role Content Folders". Note that when you use this method of adding the files you won't see the content elements appear in your service definition. They get auto injected at package time. If you are doing this as part of a build process that may not happen since VS tooling is doing the injection, but to be fair I didn't try calling cspack directly to see if having the content elements included in the service definition file actually packaged those or not. Also, I found that just adding a new folder and just having files under that folder didn't seem to work. I had to actually add the files by name there, which seemed wrong. I did hack the .ccproj file to use a wildcard on the folder include, which did work, but also seemed like a hack to me.

Upvotes: 2

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