visual studio 2017 - VSTS: Directory 'd:a1a' is empty. Nothing will be added to build artifact 'drop'

Question

I am making my first build in VSTS and I have had to ask a number of questions on SO. I have now been able to restore nuget packages and build my project but now I have to ensure the artifacts are copied to the right place. My last build attempt failed for this reason: Directory 'd:a1a' is empty. Nothing will be added to build artifact 'drop'. My build is defined as;

The Copy Files

The .Net Core build;

And the publish;

And from the build I get this error;

Directory 'd:a1a' is empty. Nothing will be added to build artifact 'drop'.

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

You need to copy and add artifact, so for me I had to add this code to the end of my .yaml file

- task: CopyFiles@2
  inputs:
    targetFolder: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)'    

- task: PublishBuildArtifacts@1    
  displayName: 'Publish Artifact: drop'
  inputs:
    PathtoPublish: '$(build.artifactstagingdirectory)'