I know Carlos has a very similar if not the same issue https://our.umbraco.com/forum/umbraco-9/106583-how-to-deploy-local-umbraco-9-to-a-hosting-vps-running-iis

I’m trying to get my first v9 website running on our development server, it works fine in Visual Studio Code on my local PC.

It is running off an .MDF file rather than SQL server.

I’ve run “dotnet publish --configuration Release” and then navigated to the following folder: “xxxxx\bin\Release\net5.0\publish” and uploaded the contents of the publish folder to the root of the IIS site, and then copied the Umbraco.MDF file to the xxxx\umbraco\Data (I had to create the Data folder) - like Carlos, publish didn't put the MDF file into the release files.

When I tried to run the website, I couldn’t see anything happening until I commented out: /if (env.IsDevelopment()) { app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage(); }/

Now I’m getting the “Install Umbraco” screen!