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Orchard, Gulp, and VS2015 Build Errors

Posted on One min read

Recently, my team and I, have started using Visual Studio 2015 while working on our Orchard project. Orchard has started using Gulp to manage building some of the javascript used in the Layouts and Dynamic Forms modules. Since VS 2015 detects and automatically watches Gulp files, if you have a parameter set at the top of the Gulp file, node modules start automatically downloading and all JS and CSS start getting processed. This is great, until you recieve the following error when publishing.

The “CollectFilesinFolder” task failed unexpectedly. System.IO.PathTooLongException

This error is thrown during the build due to the node_modules having crazy file path lengths. The easiest way to circumvent this issue is to configure the Layouts and Dynamic Forms modules project file to exclude the node_modules folder. This is quick and easy by adding the ExlcudeFoldersFromDeployment tag in the first property group of each project file.

<PropertyGroup>
    <Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">Debug<\/Configuration>
    <Platform Condition=" '$(Platform)' == '' ">AnyCPU<\/Platform>
    <ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment>node_modules<\/ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment>
<\/PropertyGroup>

Once that has been added to those project files, publishing now works. Also with this change my GIT deployments to an Azure Website magically started working too. There seems to be a fix in place according to this Github issue, I am curious if it is the same solution or not.

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