Visual Studio web and SQL publish

Question

Here's the scenario:

• MVC web project
• Three MS SQL Server database projects
• One of the databases must be populated with lookup tables
• Other tables are user data and don't need data uploading
• GoDaddy hosting
• Visual Studio 2013

I'd like to deploy everything (web project, sql schemas, reference data) to GoDaddy in one fell swoop, but they appear to only offer FTP uploading. When using FTP in the Web Publishing Wizard, it says "Database preview not supported for this method" which I'm taking "method" to mean FTP. I can publish the web project fine in FTP, but of course without the databases the web application generates errors.

So here are my questions

1. There is a "Web Deploy" publish method listed in the wizard, but GoDaddy has no information on how to set this up. Can this be used with GoDaddy and will it publish DBs also?
2. How does one configure the project to use the local SQL Server when running on localhost, but when deployed it uses the GoDaddy SQL Servers?
3. Can the data in the local DB be uploaded as part of the publishing wizard process, or is SQL Server Management Studio the tool of choice?

Thanks!

Answer 1

1. I don't believe GoDaddy supports WebDeploy. They didn't when I left their service a few years ago. You can talk to them to confirm whether this has changed.
2. This is the role of Web.Config Transforms. For an intro to the topic, see here; the article is a little out of date and doesn't mention one of the most useful points - you can add transforms for each publish profile, so they're applied according to your publish settings.
3. You probably can't upload the local DB file. In almost every hosting situation, the SQL server and the web server are two separate machines, and don't share any files (corollary: the web server doesn't have the SQL service installed). One workaround you can try is to publish the DB directly from your own machine. That is, if you can connect to the DB from your machine, you can do a Web Deploy publish to your own machine but it will send the SQL changes to your GoDaddy DB server.

A more advanced workaround for #3:

• Set up your FTP publishing settings for your files
• Figure out how to publish your DB through WebDeploy only/from the command line (you can refer to here for a sample using WebDeploy from the command line; note this is going from GoDaddy -> Local, but it's trivial to turn it around)
• Customize the web publish pipeline to insert an MSBuild target to execute your WebDeploy command line (see here for an example of modifying the pipeline; you can add the target directly in your .pubxml file if you're not intending to use it for multiple projects).

This will give you a single publish profile which will separately publish your files (via FTP) and your DB (via WebDeploy).