Knowledge Base

Web Deploy 3.0

Web Deploy (Web Deployment Tool) is a Microsoft tool that
significantly simplifies the migration, management, and deployment of
IIS web servers, web applications, and websites. You can install and
configure Web Deploy as a third-party component on your Plesk-managed
server.

Here are two reasons to have Web Deploy on your server:

Simple applications publishing. Web developers who write code in
Visual Studio® (IDE) and WebMatrix® (development tool) can use
Web Deploy to publish their applications to a production server. If
you would like to give your customers this time-saving and
easy-to-use publication method, install Web Deploy on your server.

Note: You should not install Visual Studio® and WebMatrix® on Plesk
servers. This software is installed by customers themselves on
their PCs.
New market for your hosting plans. WebMatrix® helps its users find
a suitable hosting plan in the Microsoft Web Hosting Gallery, a
catalog in which hosting providers advertise hosting offers. If you
want your hosting plans to be shown in the gallery, one of the
requirements is to have Web Deploy.

1. Install Web Deploy

There are two ways of installing Web Deploy - as a Plesk component (the
recommended way) or manual installation. The first way assumes that you
install Web Deploy like any other Plesk component, from Tools &
Settings > Updates and Upgrades > Add / Remove Components. If
you use Plesk 10.4 or earlier versions, the component installation is
unavailable, so you should perform manual installation. For installation
instructions, see the Manual Installation of Web Deploy section
below.

Note: To install Web Deploy, you need to have Microsoft Windows Powershell
installed on the server. Usually it is installed by default.
If not, install Microsoft Windows Powershell.

After successful installation, you can check that Web Deploy has been
discovered by Plesk. To do this, log in as the Plesk administrator and
go to Tools & Settings > Server Components. The new component,
Web Publishing, will appear in the list. Additionally, the ability
to use web publishing will be added to all existing subscriptions, to
the Hosting Parameters tab, and will be set as not provided by
default.

If your customers use MySQL databases for their applications, you should
also install the MySQL Connector/Net component from Microsoft Web
Platform Installer.