From: Setting up your project and TeamCity/OctoPack for front-end builds

Octopus Deploy has a nice NuGet package, called OctoPack, for generating Octopus Deploy-compatible NuGet packages out of .NET projects.

However, OctoPack will only pack files that are included in the CSPROJ file, and in the case of static files, have Build Action set to Content. This is a problem, because this means that all files generated by your task runners, be it Gulp or Grunt, will have to be included in the project and pushed out to source control.

This introduces an unnecessary problem – conflicts in generated code. So, if developer A was working on a SCSS file which was referenced in the main stylesheet, and developer B was working on a separate SCSS file, also referenced in the same main stylesheet, why should either one have to resolve a conflict caused in the file generated by the task runner?

This makes no sense. It’s like building your .NET project, and pushing the generated DLL files to source control, and then having to resolve conflicts within the DLL files generated by the build. Why would you do that?

So, in order for you to never have to resolve another conflict in generated files again, here’s my guide on how to set up your project so they play nice with TeamCity and OctoPack.

Create a NUSPEC file for your project, and include the folders that are not currently included in the project.

What this does is it informs OctoPack about the files that you want to include in the deployment package. Here’s an example.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<package >
<metadata>
<id>MyProject.Web</id>
<version>$version$</version>
<authors>Geta AS</authors>
<owners>Geta AS</owners>
<requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance>
<description>MyProject.Web deployment package</description>
<copyright>Copyright 2016</copyright>
</metadata>
<files>
<file src="public\**\*.*" target="public" />
</files>
</package>

As you can probably already tell, this will cause OctoPack to only include files stored in the specified folder in the generated deployment package. That’s no good.

On to the next step.

Update the project CSPROJ file to include all other files.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
...
<PropertyGroup>
<OctoPackEnforceAddingFiles>True</OctoPackEnforceAddingFiles>
</PropertyGroup>
...

This tells OctoPack to include all the files it would normally include in addition to the files specified in the NUSPEC file.

Once we have all this set up, we can commit the files, and push them to source control.

Source: Setting up your project and TeamCity/OctoPack for front-end builds