If you’ve been following along through Part 1 and Part 2, you’ve been having a lot of fun learning the ins and outs of nopCommerce on your local workstation, and getting it configured just so. Now it’s time to start getting everything together to deploy your custom nopCommerce application.

Open your nopCommerce Visual Studio solution, and right click on the solution name.

Open Windows Folder of Solution

Select the menu option “Open Folder in Windows Explorer”, and wait for the new window to open. There, you’ll see a file named “prepare.bat” – double-click on the file, and allow it to run.

If you get an error message that the folder can’t be found, go into the “Build” folder, and open the file “nop.framework.targets”. Look for this line:

<MSBuild Projects="$(RootFolder)\NopCommerce2.5.sln" Properties="Configuration=$(Configuration);Platform=$(Platform)" />

If the *.sln reference is different from the name of your .sln file, edit it here, save, and close the file.  

After the “prepare.bat” file has completed, double-click the file “deploy.bat” in the same folder as “prepare.bat”; when it’s completed, you will see a new folder named “Deployable”. Inside “Deployable” is another folder, labeled “nop_2.xx” (where xx is the current version number).  Inside this folder are the files that you’ll be publishing to your web server.

(Note: in previous versions of nopCommerce, it wasn’t necessary to run external batch files; in a future article, we’ll explore alternative publishing methods that are somewhat more streamlined)

Once you’ve completed the “Publish” process, it’s time to create a backup of your MSSQL database for your nopCommerce instance; remember, this is where all your configuration settings are located. Optionally, you can choose to re-create your database on your hosting server – if your configuration settings are not very complex, this may be simpler for some users.

After these steps have been completed, it’s time to acquire your FTP software, if you don’t already have it. I use Filezilla, a free, open-source FTP client. If you haven’t already selected a hosting provider, have a look at the options available here at Arvixe; for an e-commerce solution like nopCommerce, you’ll want to make sure you choose the right package in order to be able to have the dedicated IP and SSL required for a secure e-commerce solution.

Next time, we’ll step through the final steps to deploy your nopCommerce solution on an Arvixe hosting account.

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