Dev->Stage->Prod with Git deployment for Azure Websites

Question

How best should I accomplish the following deployment objectives with Git deployment for Azure?

• Easily switch when working locally to either use fake in-memory data or (eventually) non-production snapshot of real data
• Deploy to staging environment on Azure such that at first I could use fake in-memory data and eventually move to non-production snapshot of real data.
• Deploy to production with real data

I currently deploy using Github and a staging branch to a staging Azure website. Since I deploy to a public repo, the web.config file is ignored by git. (EDIT: I just learned that ignoring web.config actually causes deployment error on azure)

Any help/suggestion is appreciated.

Answer 1

Well... Here's what I did that works for me right now.

• To quickly switch between fake in-memory data locally, I use a compilation symbol LOCAL and a preprocessor directive #if LOCAL.

• Same compilation symbol works when you deploy to Azure, so I can work on fake data until I'm ready to switch to real db. I can also use the app settings if I really want to make to switch it more easily.

The challenge was to keep a web.config with "secrets" (like connection string) locally and not expose it to Github. I added it to .gitignore, but then my deployments started failing on Azure because it could not find the web.config. Just copying it to wwwroot via ftp did not help - Azure was looking for web.config in the repository.

So, to make this work I "slightly" altered the deployment process by first copying the Web.config from wwwroot to the repository before running the default deploy.cmd. This was simple - this is what you do:

1. Create a .deployment file in the root of your repository with the following:

   [config] command = deploy.my.cmd

2. Create deploy.my.cmd with the following script:

   xcopy %DEPLOYMENT_TARGET%\Web.config %DEPLOYMENT_SOURCE%\\ /Y

   deploy.cmd

Now, I have web.config with secrets locally. Git ignores this file. I uploaded the correct web.config to Azure via FTP, and it gets used whenever I deploy.

Answer 2

It's actually supposed to be simpler than that. Please see this page. Basically, the idea is that you set some AppSettings in the Azure portal to override the default values that are committed to your repo.