You will need to create the SDdraft files and then modify them using the minidom library before you publish. There is an example of this in the 10.3 help. See 'Modify SDDraft example 1': http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/10.3/analyze/arcpy-mapping/createmapsddraft.htm From ESRI's example, a service's description is changed to 'US Counties Map': <!-- language: lang-py --> import arcpy import xml.dom.minidom as DOM # the new description newDesc = 'US Counties Map' xml = r"C:\Project\Counties.sddraft" doc = DOM.parse(xml) # find the Item Information Description element descriptions = doc.getElementsByTagName('Description') for desc in descriptions: if desc.parentNode.tagName == 'ItemInfo': # modify the Description if desc.hasChildNodes(): desc.firstChild.data = newDesc else: txt = doc.createTextNode(newDesc) desc.appendChild(txt) # output to a new sddraft outXml = r"C:\Project\Output\CountiesForWeb.sddraft" f = open(outXml, 'w') doc.writexml( f ) f.close()