GitAzure

Github hook for node.js apps hosted in Microsoft Azure.

The goal of this project is to provide a source-control guided deployment procedure for Azure apps. After initial deployment using the Azure tools, subsequent deployments should be cross-platform.

A rather terribly cropped first screencast, of GitAzure used to publish updates from OS X to Azure, can be found at http://screencast.com/t/Dj4ilALj.

Creating a node.js application from scratch, hosted in Azure, source-controlled by Github.

This documentation is currently aimed at those with some prior Azure knowledge. That will change.

Step by step creating an application:

1. Unless you already have git for Windows, install msysgit from http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/detail?name=Git-1.7.8-preview20111206.exe&can=2&q=
2. Install node.js from http://nodejs.org
3. npm install -g GitAzure
4. New-AzureService servicename
5. Add-AzureNodeWebRole
6. cd WebRole1
7. Enable-AzureRemoteDesktop
8. gitazure.cmd; follow the instructions.
9. As noted, put a valid Github id_rsa and id_rsa.pub keypair in WebRole1\bin.ssh, e.g. by copying pre-existing from $env:USERPROFILE\\.ssh. Note: The private key cannot be passphrase protected.
10. git push -u origin master
11. Publish-AzureService; this will take roughly 10 minutes.
12. Add http://yoursite.cloudapp.net/githook to the service hooks of your github repository.

At this point you should be able to make changes to the code in the repository, and publish updates to your Azure application by pushing to Github. That includes writing code on other platforms than Windows.

GitAzure also supports installing npm modules, and will execute npm install on the server whenever changes to package.json are detected.

Some settings are available within your web role's gitazure.json config file, which among other things allows you to restrict application updates to a specific branch (e.g. 'azure').

More to come.

Important

Before pushing to a public repository, please make sure that no sensitive data is included. Such data includes Web.cloud.config files with e.g. storage keys. The default Web.cloud.config does not contain storage keys or anything else sensitive, so the procedure above is safe. Should you customize your setup in any way, please make sure to either make your repository private, or add the config files to your .gitignore.

Todo

• Consider preserving the initially published web.config, e.g. by copying Web.cloud.config to Web.config in case of a change to either.
• Make polling / service bus solution for deploying to load balanced apps.
• Ensure that update is attempted on application startup -- but prevent it from flooding on e.g. application crash.