Using ExcludeFilesFromDeployment with gulp-msbuild

Question

I'm trying to set up a gulp task for publishing, similar to the Habitat model and the Sitecore development book. One suggestion people have had is to exclude things like the Sitecore DLLs, Coveo DLLs, etc, that aren't needed to be included in a deployment. I've been able to set this up in a publish profile, where it looks like this:

<ExcludeFilesFromDeployment>bin\Sitecore.*.dll;bin\Coveo.*.dll;bin\Newtonsoft.*.dll;packages.config</ExcludeFilesFromDeployment>

In the gulp task properties, I was able to add the ExcludeFilesFromDeployment property to the properties node, but it doesn't seem to recognize/accept it. Also, if I use the semicolon-delimited list, it throws an error. I'd like to add this in at the task level, rather than have a publish profile in every project...using a property to tell the task to use a profile works, if the excluded files are specified there, but that's a lot of extra overhead.

Answer 1

I was able to exclude the Sitecore DLLs from the Deployment when adding ExcludeFilesFromDeployment: 'bin\\Sitecore.*.dll' to my properties object used in gulp-msbuild. The same is probably possible using ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment.

I could not exclude multiple files with the proposed semicolon notation. But when using MSBuild directly in command line, adding a compile switch like this worked for me: /p:ExcludeFilesFromDeployment:"bin\Sitecore.Kernel.dll; bin\Sitecore.Logging.dll".

Maybe someone else is able to clarify the last part.

Answer 2

I have tried to achieve the same in the past. Even after several Google searches and personal attempts, I couldn't find anything to exclude files from deployment. The Gulp task is trying to pass the ExcludeFileFromDeployment as parameter to the msbuild.exe. I'm afraid the msbuild.exe doesn't recognize any parameter named ExcludeFileFromDeployment.

To work this around, I created a task for deleting files after publishing them. e.g.

var del = require('del');

[...] code here [...]

gulp.task("03-Clean-Transform-Files", function () {

  var removableBuildConfiguration = "";
  if(config.buildConfiguration == "Release") {
      removableBuildConfiguration = ".Debug.deploytransform";
  } else if(config.buildConfiguration == "Debug") {
      removableBuildConfiguration = ".Release.deploytransform";
  }

  return del([config.websiteRoot + '\\*\\*' + removableBuildConfiguration, 
              config.websiteRoot + '\\*' + removableBuildConfiguration], {force: true}).then(paths => {
    util.log('Deleted files and folders:\n', paths.join('\n'));
  });

});

My Gulp script is going to delete every file that matches the pattern *.Debug.deploytransform or *.Release.deploytransform in the name.

Answer 3

You could try using this to exclude these files in Gulp

gulp.task("CI-Prepare-Package-Files, function (callback) {
    var excludeList = [
      config.websiteRoot + "\\bin\\{Sitecore,Lucene,Newtonsoft,System,Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure}*dll",
      config.websiteRoot + "\\compilerconfig.json.defaults",
      config.websiteRoot + "\\packages.config",
      config.websiteRoot + "\\App_Config\\Include\\{Feature,Foundation,Project}\\*Serialization.config",
      config.websiteRoot + "\\App_Config\\Include\\{Feature,Foundation,Project}\\z.*DevSettings.config",
      "!" + config.websiteRoot + "\\bin\\Sitecore.Support*dll",
      "!" + config.websiteRoot + "\\bin\\Sitecore.{Feature,Foundation,Habitat,Demo,Common}*dll"
    ];
    console.log(excludeList);

    return gulp.src(excludeList, { read: false }).pipe(rimraf({ force: true }));
});