I’ve been playing around with msdeploy and powershell lately, and one of the things I needed to find out is where the msdeploy.exe was located. After building a web deploy package, the associated batch file created by msdeploy uses a registry key to get the executables location.

Accessing the registry in powershell is super easy, so we may as well do the same thing. The key in question is: "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IIS Extensions\MSDeploy" which we can access using a standard Get-ChildItem or gci for short.

I have both MSDeploy v1 and v2 installed, and it’s the latter one I want to get at so we can use a Select –Last 1 to choose it. We also want just the InstallPath property which is accessible via GetValue on the RegistryKey object.

Great! We can easily put this into a function and load it into our path using:

function Get-MSWebDeployInstallPath(){
     return (get-childitem "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IIS Extensions\MSDeploy" | Select -last 1).GetValue("InstallPath")
}

function Load-Configuration
{
    $webDeploy = Get-MSWebDeployInstallPath
    $env:Path += (";" + $webDeploy)
}

You should be able to access msdeploy from your powershell script now…