I wrote this article “Deploy to an Azure App Service using KUDU and a zip file” that explains how to deploy a zipped file from a local workstation to KUDU.  While I was writing that post I thought, hey, why not write how to create a zipped file for deployment as well, so here goes.

I already had a publish profile for an App Service as seen in Figure 1, therefore I needed an additional profile for my local folder deployment.

Figure 1, deploy locally then compress and deploy a Visual Studio project

When you click on the “Create new profile” you are prompted as seen in Figure 2.  Select Folder –> the location to store the local publish files and then click OK.

Figure 2, deploy locally then compress and deploy a Visual Studio project

After the publish profile is created, you see the .pubxml file in the Solution Explorer as well as the output of the publish in the Output window, see Figure 3.  If there are errors you can see them in the Error List.

Figure 3, deploy locally then compress and deploy a Visual Studio project

Once deployed locally, navigate to the location where you stored the local deployment, select all and zip them up.  Figure 4.

Figure 4, deploy locally then compress and deploy a Visual Studio project

Finally, you can now drag and drop the zip file to KUDU(*) as described here and seen in Figure 5, or XCOPY, FTP or copy the unzipped content to an IIS server.

Figure 5, deploy locally then compress and deploy a Visual Studio project