Multiple skips in MSDeploy?

Question

I'm aware of the -skip parameter, but is there any way to tell MSDeploy to skip multiple directories? Invoking the parameter multiple times does not appear to work.

Answer 1

If you have the following files in the folder C:\Data\Personal\My Repo\MSDeploy\MultiSkip.

To sync source to dest the command would be:

msdeploy -verb:sync 
    -source:contentPath="C:\Data\Personal\My Repo\MSDeploy\MultiSkip\Source" 
    -dest:contentPath="C:\Data\Personal\My Repo\MSDeploy\MultiSkip\Dest"

The changes are show in figure below.

With no skips there are 19 changes.

Skip 1 folder

Then the command to skip the sub03 directory would be:

msdeploy -verb:sync 
    -source:contentPath="C:\Data\Personal\My Repo\MSDeploy\MultiSkip\Source" 
    -dest:contentPath="C:\Data\Personal\My Repo\MSDeploy\MultiSkip\Dest" 
    -skip:objectName=dirPath,absolutePath="sub03"

The result would be:

So there are 14 added files.

Skip 2 directories

To skip 2 directories the command would be

msdeploy -verb:sync 
    -source:contentPath="C:\Data\Personal\My Repo\MSDeploy\MultiSkip\Source" 
    -dest:contentPath="C:\Data\Personal\My Repo\MSDeploy\MultiSkip\Dest" 
    -skip:objectName=dirPath,absolutePath="sub03" 
    -skip:objectName=dirPath,absolutePath="sub02"

Then the result of that is There are only 9 changes here so we can see that multiple skips does work.

Answer 2

The skip:objectName=dirPath,absolutePath= accepts a regular expression, therefore you can achieve the same result as the answer above using:

-skip:objectName=dirPath,absolutePath="sub02|sub03"

The pipe | indicating OR