Troubleshooting Web Deploy

Applies to:   Internet Information Services

This quick guide will help you troubleshoot Web Deploy (Web Deployment Tool).

Prerequisites

This guide requires the following prerequisites:

• .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 or greater
• Web Deploy 1.0 or greater

Troubleshooting operations

The first level of validation for an operation should be the -whatif flag. The -whatif flag will show you what would happen if you ran a command and everything was successful. It's intended to be a comparison flag, and won't show you many errors. But if the operation didn't go as expected and -whatif didn't find any issues, you can use the -verbose flag to specify output settings. This is very useful if you need to determine what failed to sync, and often gives additional detail about the operation.

To run with verbose output

Let's say we were running a sync operation. Run the command again, with -verbose specified:

msdeploy.exe -verb:sync -source:metakey=lm/w3svc/1,computername=Server1 -dest:metakey=lm/w3svc/1 -verbose >msdeploysync-verbose.log

By specifying >msdeploysync-verbose.log, the results of the operation and all the extra informational alerts will be listed in the log file and you can easily refer back to it.

Depending on the error, you should look through the log for related entries. For example, if a property wasn't set correctly, check the verbose logging actions to see why it was missed or skipped.

Common errors

Cannot read configuration file or similar error may be due to running from a non-elevated command prompt on Windows Server 2008. Ensure you have administrative credentials for operations like reading configuration, writing configuration, or registry settings.

An assembly or other object with commas in its path doesn't sync correctly. This is a known issue and requires using double and single quotes around the path. For example, the path to an assembly contains commas and must be specially treated: -source:gacAssembly="'System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a'"

If your site has no ServerComment set on IIS 6.0, the ABO Mapper component will be unable to recognize them on IIS 7.0 and above, and they won't be migrated correctly.

If you don't have IIS installed on the source or destination machine when you're trying to access IIS-related providers such as metakey or apphostconfig, you may receive the following error message:

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {2B72133B-3F5B-4602-8952-803546CE3344} failed due to the following error: 80040154.

Remote service errors

404 Remote file not found: The remote service isn't installed or running, or the URL is incorrect. It's a manual startup service, so make sure that it's running.

The connection to the remote machine times out or returns a timeout error. Verify that the port for the remote service is open on the target machine. If it's open, re-try the command. It may work after a retry.