How to exclude files from Publish Profile

When publishing ASP.NET Core web apps, it will publish/deploy the:

• Build artifacts
• files with .config extension
• files with .json extension
• everything inside wwwroot folder

At certain times you may need to exclude some specific file or folder from deployment content.

There are two ways you can exclude files from publishing.

Content Tag

If you need to prevent multiple files from being copied to deployed folder, you can use globbing patterns to cover a range of matching files.

Content tag will be used to specify the action on the file. For example, the following Content element will exclude all (.txt) files in the wwwroot\content folder and its subfolders.

<ItemGroup>
  <Content Update="wwwroot/content/**/*.txt" CopyToPublishDirectory="Never" />
</ItemGroup>

Note that it will delete all (.txt) files that are already exists at the deployed site within specified folder path.

You can specify different globbing patterns as per your requirement. Another version of pattern coud be like this:

<ItemGroup>
  <Content Update="wwwroot/content/Site*.css" CopyToPublishDirectory="Never" />
</ItemGroup>

This will match all css files in wwwroot/content folder with file name starts with Site e.g. SiteAdmin.css, SiteCustomer.css, etc...

You can add this markup to a publish profile (.pubxml file) or the .csproj file. Since .csproj file operates at the global level, if you add this tag to the .csproj file, the rule will be applied to all publish profiles in the project.

MsDeploySkipRules Tag

Another way to exclude file or folder is to use MsDeploySkipRules tag.

The following tag excludes all files/folders from the wwwroot\content folder:

<ItemGroup>
  <MsDeploySkipRules Include="CustomSkipFolder">
    <ObjectName>dirPath</ObjectName>
    <AbsolutePath>wwwroot\\content</AbsolutePath>
  </MsDeploySkipRules>
</ItemGroup>

Note that unlike Content tag, this will not delete the targeted file or folder if that are already exists on the deployed site.

Similarly you can specify a single file in AbsolutePath tag, but you need to change the ObjectName tag to filePath rather than dirPath, and also change the value of Include attribute from CustomSkipFolder to CustomSkipFile.

<ItemGroup>
  <MsDeploySkipRules Include="CustomSkipFile">
    <ObjectName>filePath</ObjectName>
    <AbsolutePath>wwwroot\\content\\Site.css</AbsolutePath>
  </MsDeploySkipRules>
</ItemGroup>

References:

• Microsoft Docs - Visual Studio publish profiles for ASP.NET Core app deployment