Can I publish pure website using dotnet publish?

I've got a pure front end website, with no .NET stuff at all. And I want to utilize VS' web deploy to publish to my server.

I already added it to Visual Studio with 'Add -> Existing Web Site' menu, and created a .pubxml publish profile. I tried directly publishing this web site from within Visual Studio's and it worked.

Now I want to add this to my publish .cmd file using command line. So can I achieve this using dotnet publish command, like a normal asp.net Core API project?

e.g. dotnet publish <project|solution> /p:PublishProfile=Properties\PublishProfiles\dev.pubxml /p:Password=xxx

The problem here is there's no .csproj file under the project directory.