Publish a site in Visual Studio using implicit FTP over TLS/SSL

By David Pipkin
Lead Software Developer, code whisperer

Publishing websites through Visual Studio is a must-have for many web developers who want to maintain various target environments for their project. However, many servers are locked down and will not allow the standard publishing methods, such as Web Deploy, Standard FTP, and File System Access. I was recently presented with a scenario where I needed to publish to a server whose only access was through implicit FTP over TLS and as I scoured the internet for a solution, nothing came up.

The good news is, after testing various ways to achieve what I wanted, I did come up with a solution. Visual Studio wants to connect to port 21 by default when using the FTP publishing method. As you may already know, the default port for implicit TLS/SSL is 990, unlike explicit TLS/SSL which shares the default port 21. To tell Visual Studio about the details of how you want to connect, you simply have to include the protocol and port in the Server box instead of just the typical host name.

So, instead of site.com, you would use ftps://site.com:990. That's it. You will now be able to publish to your secured location.

Article last updated on 4/21/2018