Exercise - Publish for self-contained deployment

Self-contained deployments include the app and its dependencies, as well as the .NET runtime. Since the .NET runtime is included with the app, the target machine doesn't need to have the .NET runtime installed in order to run the app. This makes self-contained deployments larger than framework-dependent deployments. Self-contained apps must also handle deploying .NET runtime updates to receive the latest patches.

Your IT department notified your team that for disaster recovery purposes, they're testing your app on servers that don't have the .NET runtime installed. They intend to test the app on both a 64-bit Windows server and a 64-bit Linux server. To support this testing, you need to publish the app as a self-contained deployment for each environment.

In this exercise, you publish an ASP.NET Core app as self-contained deployments for Windows and Linux.

Publish as a self-contained deployment

1. In the terminal window, navigate to the MyWebApp directory. At the end of the previous exercise, you were in MyWebApp/publish-fd. You need to go back to the MyWebApp directory.

   cd ..
   

   You should now be in the MyWebApp directory.

2. Run the following command to publish the app as a self-contained deployment for 64-bit Windows:

   dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 -o publish-scd-win64 --self-contained
   

   In the previous command:

   • -c Release specifies that the app should be built in release mode. This optimizes the app for performance.
   • -r win-x64 specifies that the app should be published for 64-bit Windows. win-x64 is the runtime identifier (RID) for 64-bit Windows, so the app is published as a self-contained deployment for 64-bit Windows.
   • -o publish-scd-win64 specifies the output directory for the published app.
   • --self-contained specifies that the app should be published as a self-contained deployment.

   This command builds and publishes the app as a self-contained deployment for 64-bit Windows to the MyWebApp/publish-scd-win64 directory.

3. Review the contents of the MyWebApp/publish-scd-win64 directory in the Explorer window.

   The list of files in this directory is significantly larger than the list of files in the publish-fd directory. This is because the self-contained deployment includes the same files as the framework-dependent deployment, in addition to the .NET runtime. The MyWebApp.exe file is the 64-bit Windows executable for the app.

4. Run the following command to publish the app as a self-contained deployment for 64-bit Linux:

   dotnet publish -c Release -r linux-x64 -o publish-scd-linux64 --self-contained
   

   This time, the -r linux-x64 option specifies that the app should be published for 64-bit Linux.

5. Review the contents of the MyWebApp/publish-scd-linux64 directory in the Explorer window.

   The list of files in the publish-scd-linux64 directory is similar to the list of files in the publish-scd-win64 directory, but the executable file is named MyWebApp instead of MyWebApp.exe. This is because Linux doesn't use file extensions to determine file types. After you deploy the app to a Linux server, you'll need to grant execute permission to the MyWebApp file with the chmod +x command before it can run.