Deploy your Website Using IIS 7 - Part I

As an industry best practice, developers should not have access to the Production server.  Developers can use Dev servers as their playground and build any number of proofs-of-concept.  And developers can perform any number of tests on the Test servers.  But, while developers need to deploy websites from the Test environment to the Production environment, they need not be granted direct access to the Production servers.

There are a number of ways to deploy a website to the secure Production environment.  My prefered method is to export a package of my website from IIS 7 in the Test server.  I can then import this package into the IIS 7 of the Production server.  All files in the package contents would be identical in both environments. 

Of course, you would not want the web config files in one environment to be copied to the other.  The same is true for SSL Certificates and other environment-specific files.  Not to worry: you can exclude them from the package you export.

This blog will help you create a package of your website using the IIS Manager and the Web Deployment Tool in IIS 7.0 or above.

Export a Package

1. Always make a backup of your Production web server, in case a website deployment to Production fails, and a rollback becomes necessary.  Run the following command to backup the IIS server:
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd add backup “PreMsDeploy”

2. Open the IIS Manager by clicking Start -> Run and typing INETMGR

3. In IIS Manager, in the Connections pane, select the Server node

4. In the right-hand Actions pane, under Deploy, click the Export Server Package… link to launch the wizard

5. In the Export Server Package dialog, Select All the Contents of the Package

6. Click Next

7. In the Select Parameters dialog, select no parameters.  Click Next

8.  In the Save Package dialog, click the Browse button to choose a location to save your exported package.  The Package name must have a ZIP file extension.  For this example, “2012-07-09 IISBackup.zip” is used

9. Enter the Encryption Password

10.  The wizard will now complete the packaging process and save the package to disk.  When it is complete, a Summary page documents an overview of what actions were performed.  Click Finish.

That's it.  You have now created an exported package of your website using IIS 7 Manager.

In Part II, we will walk through the steps to import this package from the Test server into the Production server.