NAnt and ASP.NET on Mono

Most of my personal projects are built on top of ASP.NET, Mono and Lighttpd. One of the benefits of keeping them all running on the same stack (as opposed to mixing Python, Mono and PHP together) is that I don't need to maintain different infrastructure bits to keep them all up and running. Two key pieces that keep it easy to dive back into the the side-project whenever I have some (spurious) free time are my NAnt scripts and my push scripts.

NAnt
I use my NAnt script for a bit more than just building my web projects, more often than not I use it to build, deploy and test everything related to the site. My projects are typically laid out like:

bin/ Built DLLs, not in Subversion
configs/ Web.config files per-development machine
libraries/ External libraries, such as Memcached.Client.dll, etc.
schemas/ Files containing the SQL for rebuilding my database
site/ Fully built web project, including Web.config and .aspx files
sources/ Actual code, .aspx.cs and web folder (htdocs/ containing styles, javascript, etc)

Executing "nant run" will build the entire project and construct the full version of the web application in the site/ and finally fire up xsp2 on localhost for testing. The following NAnt file is what I've been carrying from project to project.

The Push Script
Since I usually build and deploy on the same machine, I use a simple script called "push.sh" to handle rsyncing data from the development part of my machine into the live directories.




#!/bin/bash


###############################


##      Push script variables


export NANT='/usr/bin/nant'


export STAGE=`hostname`


export SOURCE='site/'


export LIVE_TARGET='/serv/www/domains/myproject.com/htdocs/'


export BETA_TARGET='/serv/www/domains/beta.myproject.com/htdocs/'


export TARGET=$BETA_TARGET


###############################





###############################


##      Internal functions


function output {


        echo "===> $1"


}


function build { 


        ${NANT} && ${NANT} site


}


###############################





###############################


##      Build the site first


output "Building the site..."


build


if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then


        output "Looks like there was an error building! abort!"


        exit 1


fi





###############################


##      Start actual pushing


if [ "${1}" = 'live' ]; then 


        output " ** PUSHING THE LIVE SITE ***"


        export TARGET=$LIVE_TARGET


else


        output "Pushing the beta site"


fi





output "Using Web.config-${STAGE}"


output "Pushing to: ${TARGET}"





cp config/Web.config-${STAGE} site/Web.config


rsync --exclude *.swp --exclude .svn/ -av ${SOURCE} ${TARGET}

Depending on the complexity of the web application I might change the scripts up on a case-by-case basis, but for the most part I have about 5-6 projects out "in the ether" that are built and deployed with a derivative of the NAnt script and push.sh listed above. In general though, they provide a good starting point for the tedious bits of non-Visual Studio-based web development (especially if you're in an entirely Linux-based environment).

Hope you find them helpful :)