Missing DLL's when publishing ASP.NET Core web app

Question

When I publish my ASP.NET Core (v1.0.0) MVC 6 app, it fails to run successfully when viewing any page (ie, the server/host starts up fine but throws an error when a GET request is made). When starting the app at the command prompt, I can see that it complains about a missing DLL. I added the missing DLL to the published directory (where the app is hosted by IIS/Krestel) and then it complained about another DLL, and then another, and so on. Ultimately, it needed the following DLL's before everything ran successfully:

Microsoft.DotNet.Cli.Utils.dll
Microsoft.DotNet.ProjectModel.dll
Microsoft.Extensions.CommandLineUtils.dll
NuGet.Common.dll
NuGet.Configuration.dll
NuGet.DependencyResolver.Core.dll
NuGet.Frameworks.dll
NuGet.LibraryModel.dll
NuGet.Packaging.Core.dll
NuGet.Packaging.Core.Types.dll
NuGet.Packaging.dll
NuGet.ProjectModel.dll
NuGet.Protocol.Core.Types.dll
NuGet.Protocol.Core.v3.dll
NuGet.Repositories.dll
NuGet.RuntimeModel.dll
NuGet.Versioning.dll

I'm not sure why the NuGet DLL's are required for a published web app or why this is even happening at all. Obviously Visual Studio should take care of this sort of thing for us. For now when I publish I don't have it clear all files first (so the DLL's I manually copied stay there) but I would like to know why, if these DLL's are needed, are they not included as part of the deploy process?

Here is my project.json, in case that helps:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Diagnostics": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Razor.Tools": {
      "version": "1.0.0-preview2-final",
      "type": "build"
    },
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.IISIntegration": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.StaticFiles": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Session": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.EnvironmentVariables": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.Json": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Console": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Debug": "1.0.0",
    "Serilog.Extensions.Logging": "1.2.0",
    "Serilog.Sinks.File": "2.2.0",
    "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.BrowserLink.Loader": "14.0.0",
    "System.Data.Common": "4.1.0",
    "System.Data.SqlClient": "4.1.0",
    "System.DirectoryServices.Linq": "1.2.2.1",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Filter": "1.0.0",
    "BundlerMinifier.Core": "2.2.281"
  },

  "tools": {
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Razor.Tools": "1.0.0-preview2-final",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.IISIntegration.Tools": "1.0.0-preview2-final"
  },

  "frameworks": {
    "net462": {}
  },

  "buildOptions": {
    "emitEntryPoint": true,
    "preserveCompilationContext": true
  },

  "publishOptions": {
    "include": [
      "wwwroot",
      "Views",
      "appsettings.json",
      "web.config"
    ]
  },

  "scripts": {
    "prepublish": [ "npm install", "bower install", "gulp clean", "gulp min" ],
    "postpublish": [ "dotnet publish-iis --publish-folder %publish:OutputPath% --framework %publish:FullTargetFramework%" ]
  },

  "configurations": {
    "DEV": {
      "compilationOptions": { "define": [ "DEV" ] },
      "buildOptions": { "define": [ "DEV" ] }
    },
    "PROD_SRV": {
      "compilationOptions": { "define": [ "TEST_SRV" ] },
      "buildOptions": { "define": [ "TEST_SRV" ] }
    },
    "PROD_SRV_DEV": {
      "compilationOptions": { "define": [ "TEST_SRV_DEV" ] },
      "buildOptions": { "define": [ "TEST_SRV_DEV" ] }
    },
    "TEST": {
      "compilationOptions": { "define": [ "TEST" ] },
      "buildOptions": { "define": [ "TEST" ] }
    },
    "TEST_SRV": {
      "compilationOptions": { "define": [ "TEST_SRV" ] },
      "buildOptions": { "define": [ "TEST_SRV" ] }
    },
    "TEST_SRV_DEV": {
      "compilationOptions": { "define": [ "TEST_SRV_DEV" ] },
      "buildOptions": { "define": [ "TEST_SRV_DEV" ] }
    }
  }
}

Any ideas?

Thanks guys and gals!

Answer 1

Well, I fixed the problem. I created a new ASP.NET Core (.NET Framework) web application project and was able to publish without issue. So I compared the values in the project.json/global.json files with the versions in my project. I updated all the versions to the latest version in project.json, but that didn't fix it. But after updating key "sdk:version" in global.json to "1.0.0-preview2-003131" it worked. I can't believe that was the issue, but it worked.

After a lot of headache I was also able to get Web Deploy to work as well. Too much effort just to publish!