You can publish Plato to your configured IIS site using web deploy. Before following the steps within this guide please ensure you have the latest version of web deploy installed for Visual Studio. Visit the Microsoft site to download the latest version of web deploy.

Publishing Plato via Visual Studio

TIP Before publishing Plato via Visual Studio please ensure you've built the entire Plato solution in "Release" mode and targeting the "Production" environment within Visual Studio. During publishing all release assemblies will be copied so it's important you build Plato in Release mode before publishing Plato.

In this example we'll publish to an IIS web site running locally on our machine. This is the same web site we configured during installation here. You can also use web deploy to publish to Azure App Services, Azure Virtual Machines or even via FTP.

These targets are beyond the scope of this articles however you can find further information here.

1. Right click the Plato web site project within the Visual Studio solution explorer and choose Publish...

2. In the Publish dialog:

Ensure the Plato+IIS publishing profile is selected and click Publish...

IMPORTANT If your not running on localhost and you didn't name your web site Plato you will likely need to use the Configure button (replaced with a pencil icon in Visual Studio 2019) within the Publish dialog to provide your server address and the site name for your web site within IIS.

3. Once the publishing has completed you can see the results within the Visual Studio Output Window. If everything was successful you should see an Output Window similar the one shown below...

NOTE Please be patient when publishing Plato for the first time. After the first publish further publishes should be much quicker as only the updated files will be published. With the first publish Visual Studio has to copy all files from the Plato source code into your target publishing folder. This can take several minutes to complete.

Loading the Published Plato Site

Verify the publishing was successful by browsing the IIS web site you've just published to. Open IIS and right click your configured web site. Select Advanced Settings and Browse as shown below...

This will attempt to launch the web site within your default browser. If everything was successful you should see the Plato web based set-up as shown below...

If you see the web based setup this indicates everything was successful with the publishing process. You can now use the Plato web based setup page to configure your Plato database & default administrator account. Please see web based set-up to learn more about setup.

Publishing Problems

If you encounter any errors after publishing and attempting to load Plato please see our Common Errors area. If your issue is not addressed via our common errors area please don't hesitate to post your questions and we'll assist as quickly as possible.