I'm interested in developing ASP.NET Core web applications and host them on my Linux-based shared web hosting server with Apache httpd. I know the technical details of setting up an http proxy to connect Apache with an ASP.NET Core process. It involves a lot of manual configuration, and I'm thinking about writing a tool that brings sort of the comfort that IIS offers on Windows.
But then there's still the publish process. What's the user story about that? Is there any? Visual Studio can only publish to a file system folder, not to SFTP or even FTP/SSL. So it doesn't seem to support publishing over the public internet. (Unencrypted FTP is not an option. FTP is not recommended in general due to its limitations and issues.) Specifically I need something to take down the remote application, replace the files and restart or reactivate the web application. Much like IIS does it with app_offline.htm or what the exact name was.
When publishing an application, there should ideally be no downtime. So doing it all manually is not acceptable as it would take a long time and be error-prone.
Are there third-party tools that take the local folder where VS has published into and put that on the web server? Maybe the upload process could even be decoupled from taking the application offline so the downtime is minimal.
I've seen demos regarding Docker containers with Azure but I know nothing about that yet and I don't know whether I could even use that on my server.
Now it seems like ASP.NET Core is only cross-platform (or even independent of IIS) if you accept to spend a lot of time tinkering with the basics. Not a welcoming situation at all.