Test your ASP.NET Core repo locally

If you're having problems deploying your ASP.NET Core repo to Kudu/Azure, the first step is to check whether it works correctly locally.

Please use the following steps. If anything doesn't work, then you have an issue that is not related to Kudu, and you should work through it before attempting to deploy to Azure.

Start clean

Make a clean clone of your repository in a new folder. This is important to make sure you don't rely on uncommitted files that Kudu won't have.

Restore NuGet packages

Go to the folder that has your solution file, and run

nuget restore

Build your solution

Build it in-place using the following command. Change MySolution.sln to the name of your solution file:

msbuild MySolution.sln /t:Build /p:Configuration=Release 

Publish the files to a test folder

Replace src\MyAspNetCoreProject by the path to the folder that has your web app's project.json. You can also adjust the test output folder.

dotnet publish src\MyAspNetCoreProject --output c:\output --configuration Release --no-build

Run your web app from the output folder

Go to the output folder you used in the previous steps, and run (adjust with the name of your web project's assembly):

dotnet MyAspNetCoreProject.dll

It should give you a URL you can go to, e.g.

Now listening on: http://localhost:5000

Go to that URL and make sure your app works.