Express 4 app doesn't work in Azure when deployed via GitHub

Question

I'm working on an Express app that I initially created from the Basic Azure Node.js Express 4 Application template in Visual Studio. In other words, it has the web.config modifications necessary to support Express 4's www\bin structure.

This app works fine when debugging via Visual Studio or running directly via Node command line. However, deployments from source control do not work when I hooked it up to the GitHub repo. I can see the project root in the site\wwwroot folder. Even more strange, publishing directly from Visual Studio works.

Answer 1

This turned out to be a simple oversight, but I feel that it can easily trip up others so I'll share the answer here. I'm using the Visual Studio .gitignore file from GitHub and it includes a rule to ignore [Bb]in/ as these are usually build output. My commits were not including the contents of /bin, so my continuous deployment obviously wasn't picking these up either. Simply commenting out this line fixed this issue.