no shipping providers?

When I go into the admin area and go into configuration -> shipping -> shipping providers, I get a blank list. No shipping providers are showing up at all. Am I missing a permission? Am I missing a plugin?

Thanks for any help!

Check the Admin > Plugins (local) page.  Are they there, but just not installed?
If you don't see any at all, check your \Plugins folder.  They all start with "Shipping."

Yes, thanks, after posting I went and looked at the code that's populating that view (admin -> configuration -> shipping -> shipping providers) and found that it pulls from data about shipping "computational methods" provided by plugins which are found by "PluginFinder" (as opposed to a database table), and that that's looking at the InstalledPlugins.txt file in App_Data, and then I found that that file had nothing in it except my plugin, and I found the shipping plugins. I guess when you publish you're supposed to "exclude files from App_Data" if you don't want your list of installed plugins (among other things, like what database server and database Nop connects to) to get overwritten.

The App_Data files Settings.txt and InstalledPlugins.txt are not part the source code solution, and would not get 'copied' by any VS Publish.  They get created during the normal (online) install process.  If you're copying code from a staging site, then yes, you have to be careful that they are not copied if you plan to run the install first in prod.  If you also copy your staging database to prod (which some do for 'first time install', then you probably would include those files, and then modify the connection string in Settings.txt.