Missing plugins when building with Visual Studio Code

Ahh thank you... I am getting there!

So, the App_Data\plugins.json file produced when using dotnet publish is empty, however the version in  \source\Presentation\Nop.Web\App_Data is populated with all of my installed plugins.

Do you happen to know why, when publishing, the plugins.json settings are not getting carried through to the published version?

I assume there is something simple causing this; we are close :)

Maybe you don’t want that anyway - i.e overwrite you production config files each time?
Can you just copy up the config files the first time

Later on - potentially your configuration in development compared to production may change
Certainly there are settings appSettings.json that will be different from development to production
Also with plugins - you maybe may have some disabled for development purposes and maybe a different final set in production

I don’t know about the docker, thing but its rare to upload a full set of files after the initial setup
Often any changes to the core is just uploading one or two files.
I publish to a local directory then upload the couple of fiels that may have changed as a result of some development to the core
For plugin upgrades you just upload everything in the \Plugins\XXX directory or use the Upload plugin function