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azurecertificate
Nil Pun
Nil Pun

Reputation: 17373

Windows Azure Web Role PublishSettings file purpose

As part of deployment we need to create publish settting file or self signed certificate.

Could someone please help me understand why we need this? To encrypt every request from given machine or any machine?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 145

Answers (2)

mcollier
mcollier

Reputation: 3719

To publish a deployment from a tool (Visual Studio, PowerShell, or custom using the Service Management API), you will need to authorize that tool to work with Windows Azure. If you deploy via the Windows Azure management portal, this isn't needed because it knows you (via your authenticated Microsoft Account).

That authorization comes in the form of an X509 certificate. Like you mentioned, you can create it yourself, or you can have Windows Azure create one for you in the form of a .publishsettings file. That file contains an encoded X509 certificate. When you import that file into a tool like Visual Studio or the PowerShell cmdlets, the certificate is installed to your local certificate store. Then it can be used to authenticate requests between your machine and Windows Azure.

As for how to manage the certs, I typically prefer to have at least one per machine. I think it makes it easier to remove a cert if I need to, and not impact other machines I'm using. But, that's really up to you.

Upvotes: 4

Neil Thompson
Neil Thompson

Reputation: 6425

I always assumed the certificate was needed to authenticate the right to publish

(you don't want just anybody being able to deploy to your site)

Upvotes: 0

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