This weekend, I was working on my old MVC application. Azure was charging me around $55 a month for a Basic app service, while a similar Linux one only costs around $13. Migrating my MVC app from Windows to Linux would save me 42 dollars a month.
However, when publishing my app to the Linux app service, I ran into an issue. It threw the common InvalidOperationException: “The view ‘Index’ was not found“.
First I checked whether my folders and files were all correctly named (upper/lower case, etc). This was not the case. After some digging around, I found that my Visual Studio publish wasn’t publishing the Views folder.
Luckily, the fix for this is an easy one. Just copy-paste the following code into your MVC project’s .csproj file. After this, try publishing your project to Azure again.
I hope this helps!
<Target Name="CopyCustomContentOnPublish" AfterTargets="Publish">
<ItemGroup>
<Views Include="Views\**" />
</ItemGroup>
<Copy SourceFiles="@(Views)" DestinationFolder="$(PublishDir)%(Views.RelativeDir)" />
</Target>
