I have tried to follow the instructions in Installing and Configuring Web Deploy for Administrator and non-administrator Deployments, but the Web Platform Installer 4.0 is taking too long.
I started with installing Web Deploy without too much trouble (although I ended up cancelling and installing .NET 4.0 manually because that was taking too long). However, installing the “Recommended Server Configuration for Web Hosting Providers” has been installing for more than 24 hours now and is still only on step 6 of 21 (it says it is installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1). I have confirmed there is still disk activity, but no network activity – it will probably finish if I give it a few more days, but really, should it take days?
Do I really need to install the full Visual Studio, Visual Web Developer, SQL Server, and who knows what else (as per the documentation, I opted out of MySql and PHP) JUST to set up automated web deployments?
My question is whether there is a step by step guide anywhere that tells how to set up automated deployments without using Web Platform Installer? I found the following 2 guides, but both of them require you to use it, and seem to indicate that there are several steps that would have to be done manually if you don’t. However, they are not very clear on all of the steps, all required dependencies, and what order they should be done in when installing from .msi files.
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/1075/installing-and-configuring-web-deploy/
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/13/automating-deployment-with-microsoft-web-deploy.aspx
After 48 hours (and 14.5 GB of whatever installed) I finally gave up and decided to start over.
Apparently, the “Recommended Server Configuration for Web Hosting Providers” is optional. I followed these steps in order to set up remote deployment: