Empty Function App when deploying from Azure DevOps Release Pipeline - azure

Question

We have a durable function that executes multiple processing steps in a specific order, using the Function Chaining pattern.
Since the Function App has 2 clients, 2 orchestrators and multiple activities, the folder structure of our solution is as shown in the screenshot below
Since all of our code is in a Git Repo in Azure DevOps, we use a CI/CD process with Azure Pipelines, to build the solution for every new PR created, and after a new version of the development branch is created, we have a release pipeline that should continuously deploy the new version to our staging environment in Azure.
The build pipeline looks like this:
variables:
- name: BuildConfiguration
value: Release
trigger:
branches:
include:
- main
- develop
pool:
vmImage: windows-latest
jobs:
- job: 'CI_Job'
displayName: 'Build and Publish Function App'
continueOnError: false
steps:
- checkout: self
clean: true
- task: UseDotNet#2
displayName: 'Install .NET SDK'
inputs:
packageType: 'sdk'
version: '6.x'
- task: DotNetCoreCLI#2
displayName: 'Restore NuGet Packages'
inputs:
command: 'restore'
projects: '**/*.csproj'
- task: DotNetCoreCLI#2
displayName: "Build Solution"
inputs:
command: 'build'
projects: '**/*.csproj'
arguments: '--configuration $(BuildConfiguration) --no-restore'
- task: DotNetCoreCLI#2
displayName: "Run Unit Tests"
inputs:
command: 'test'
projects: 'test/**/*Tests.csproj'
arguments: '--no-restore'
testRunTitle: 'Test Functions'
- task: DotNetCoreCLI#2
displayName: "Publish Solution"
inputs:
command: 'publish'
projects: '**/*.csproj'
publishWebProjects: false
modifyOutputPath: false
zipAfterPublish: true
arguments: --configuration $(BuildConfiguration) --no-restore --no-build --output $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)
- task: PublishBuildArtifacts#1
displayName: "Publish Build Artifacts"
inputs:
PathtoPublish: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)'
ArtifactName: '$(Build.Repository.Name)'
publishLocation: 'Container'
The release pipeline looks like this:
The problem is, the deployment seems to run successfully (the logs dont show any erros and even in the Deployment Center in Azure everthings looks good), but there are no functions listed in the Function App in Azure after the deployment is done.
What we have tried so far:
The release pipeline automatically sets the value WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE=1, we also checked that in the Azure portal to verify the value for this setting is as expected.
We also tried to execute a remote build by setting the value SCM_DO_BUILD_DURING_DEPLOYMENT=true in our appsettings in Azure.
When we deploy the Function App with a ZIP deployment from Visual Studio, everything works as expected.
We have another Function App that gets deployed to a deployment slot where the release pipeline does basically the same (except that it does deploy to a slot, not the Function App itself) where everything works fine. But we can't find the issue here.
So my question is what are we doing wrong or what are we not aware of?
Any advice would be highly appreciated!

Answer 1

After taking a deeper look into the artifact created by the build pipeline I could resolve the issue.
Since the production code is in the src folder and the dotnet publish task was not restricted to only publish content inside that folder, I ended up getting a ZIP folder containing all the DLLs of the solution, and inside that another ZIP folder containing the function.json files as well as the bin folder.
After adjusting the dotnet publish task as follows
- task: DotNetCoreCLI#2
displayName: "Publish Solution"
inputs:
command: 'publish'
projects: 'src/**/*.csproj'
publishWebProjects: false
modifyOutputPath: false
zipAfterPublish: true
arguments: --configuration $(BuildConfiguration) --no-restore --no-build --output $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)
I had a much smaller artifact, containing only the function.json files for my functions (inside their corresponding folders) as well as the bin folder containing the other DLLs.