Generate UDA files

Sometimes our guides require you to generate UDA files for your projects metadata. Every time you create something in the backoffice on your Umbraco Cloud project a UDA files will be generated.

Generating UDA files manually ensures that you have everything you need in order to deploy successfully from one environment to another.

What are UDA files?

When you create something in the backoffice of your Umbraco Cloud project and hit save, a UDA file will be generated.

The UDA file contains metadata and detailed information about the type that was created.

Here's an example of what a UDA file looks like for a Content Page:

{
  "Name": "Content Page",
  "Alias": "contentPage",
  "DefaultTemplate": "umb://template/3b0e5e0899414c4387ed4bf919f2e254",
  "AllowedTemplates": [
    "umb://template/3b0e5e0899414c4387ed4bf919f2e254"
  ],
  "Icon": "icon-article color-red",
  "Thumbnail": "folder.png",
  "Description": null,
  "IsContainer": false,
  "Permissions": {
    "AllowVaryingByCulture": false,
    "AllowVaryingBySegment": false,
    "AllowedAtRoot": false,
    "IsElementType": false,
    "AllowedChildContentTypes": [
      "umb://document-type/dd58f94c0b3341829186ec020cf06cfa"
    ]
  },
  "Parent": null,
  "CompositionContentTypes": [],
  "PropertyGroups": [],
  "PropertyTypes": [],
  "Udi": "umb://document-type/dd58f94c0b3341829186ec020cf06cfa",
  "Dependencies": [
    {
      "Udi": "umb://document-type/dd58f94c0b3341829186ec020cf06cfa",
      "Ordering": false,
      "Mode": 0
    },
    {
      "Udi": "umb://template/3b0e5e0899414c4387ed4bf919f2e254",
      "Ordering": true,
      "Mode": 0
    }
  ],
  "__type": "Umbraco.Deploy.Infrastructure,Umbraco.Deploy.Infrastructure.Artifacts.ContentType.DocumentTypeArtifact",
  "__version": "9.0.0-beta003"
}

This UDA file represents a Document Type with name Content Page. All dependencies for the document type is listed in the file and also metadata like AllowedAtRoot and Icon.

UDA files are generated for the following types:

• Data types
• Data type containers
• Dictionary items
• Document types
• Document type container
• Languages
• Macros
• Media types
• Member types
• Relation types
• Templates

Generate UDA files manually

Follow these steps to generate UDA files:

1. Access Kudu.
2. Navigate to CMD under the Debug console menu.
3. In the file structure, navigate to site/wwwroot/umbraco/Deploy.
4. Type the following command in the CMD console: echo > deploy-export
5. The Deploy engine will generate UDA files for all the types in your project.
6. When it's done you'll end up with a deploy-complete marker.
7. Run an extraction, making sure you can get a deploy-complete marker - see Run an extraction article.

Generating UDA files manually might sometimes end up giving you collision errors on your environments due to duplicates. This can be resolved by following our Structure Error documentation.

Find general information about Kudu and how to access the tool in the Power tools article.