My web.config contains multiple entries in "appSettings" (e.g.: twilio account key). One of these is for the asp.net chart control. It's the configuration part that states where the images the control generates are to be stored.
All of these settings work on my development machine. That is, i can connect to twilio and the chart control stores image in memory (as it should, according to the settings).
When i publish the site to my azure website (using vs), all of the settings work, apart from the chart control one. The chart control behaves as if the setting isn't even there. (it defaults to c:\TempImageFiles for storage).
I looked into the published version of the web.config and the setting is there. Only, it's beeing ignored.
My next attempt was to add that setting using the portal. (It's possible to add appSettings for a web app using the portal). I copied the exact same setting from web.config into the portal settings. This worked, so there is nothing wrong with what's in the settings.
So my question is: Why are some (at least this one) settings from web.config ignored when the app runs inside an azure web app?
You might have an app setting defined in the Web App's configuration with an identical name that overrides the web.config setting. This is typically done to have production settings stored in Azure instead of Web.config.
You can confirm if this is the case by opening your Web App's blade in the new portal, and checking the Application Settings tab there.
azure websites / azure web app service are typical web applications running on top of azure PaaS infrastructure. So whatever storage allocated to the service is accessible from the app. But it cannot be the typical C: or D: where in a regular server the app may have complete access. Mostly the C: space is allocated for IIS hosting. D:\local is something you can utilize as the app will have complete read and write access.
Please refer azure web app service sandbox details here.
If you are accessing the path via code try using Server.MapPath property to get access to the path. options like Path.GetTempPath() will not work.
One point to note is, any local storage in azure PaaS services is to be treated like a temporary storage. Whenever the site, service or role recycles the storage will be gone a fresh storage will be assigned.
Related
I have several App Services in Azure: development, test, and production. I would like to share some application settings between them like variable sets in Octopus.
Let's say I have a key A which should be same in all App Services. I would like to set its value in one place but seems that I have to configure it to each App Service. When A is changed, I have to change it to everywhere instead of having one common place to change it. Is there some way to do this?
No built-in way, app settings are part of the App Service resource.
You will need to put the settings in a common database or file.
Azure Key Vault can be used for sensitive settings and table storage/blob storage works well for other settings. Azure SQL is also an option.
Your app will then need to load these settings at startup.
This is also a documented cloud design pattern: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/external-configuration-store
Is it possible to import azure web sites application setting from a file.I could not find a direct link from the azure portal.
Update
I want to copy some application settings from one azure web site to another azure web site in our test environment. I don't want to automate this, as we have our deployment infrastructure in place. I just want some simple solution where I can export the application settings from one web-site and import to another for testing.
want to copy some application settings from one azure web site to another azure web site in our test environment
If you check the Azure web app in Azure Resource Explorer, you can find Application settings info is under config/web section, and it provides an API to update the configuration of an app.
You can try to get Application settings of one website via Azure Resource Explorer, and then you can call Rest API to update another website Application settings. If you save Application settings of one Azure website in a file, you can read file content and construct request based on it and send request to update another website.
You could upload a fresh copy of your web.config, but that'll recycle your app when you do so. That's about the only support out-of-the-box for manually changing settings via a file.
You could also do the following:
Create a Settings class that's a singleton and reads settings from a file.
Within the Settings class, set up a FileSystemWatcher on the file containing your settings.
On the FileSystemWatcher.OnChanged event, re-read your settings file.
As to Azure Portal you can go to Configuration/Application settings and open Advanced edit where you can paste JSON version of the settings. You need to do it separately for Connection strings. (If you already have settings in Azure then you can copy them from there - what would be an export in that case).
Connection strings
I would like to update a database connection string in the web.config file for an application that is currently hosted in Azure as a web app.
Seems that you can RDP into an Azure cloud service role but not a web app. If you can't RDP into an Azure web app, is there another way to update the connection string without redeploying?
You can use the portal, there is a tool called "App Service Editor" in preview that lets you edit any of the files you've deployed. I do wonder why you want to do this though, it's not considered good practice to modify source files on the fly like this! Config and app settings are exposed via the portal as well and can be modified without dropping to the app service editor tool. (under Settings/Application Settings in portal). Updating these does not update the web.config but will override web.config settings.
As Russell Young said, on Azure portal, we could use App Service Editor that provides an in-browser editing experience for our App code. And we could specify connection string in App settings section to override existing settings.
Besides, we could also to access and update Web.config file (under D:\home\site\wwwroot folder) via Kudu Debug console.
The best practise would be to use a FTP client such as File Zilla, where you can grab it, edit, save and push it back to the host without the hassle of logging into a portal and editing it directly on the server or portal.
Please note that editing a file without backing it up first, and editing a file directly on the server can cause many many problems.
I knew that we can use RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable to check if code is running in Web/Worker Role. How about Azure Websites?
I tried the above RoleEnvironment code but it always returns false. I need to run some configuration code in Application_Start so I cannot depend on the request stuff.
Any help is appreciated.
This is actually very easy simply check for existence of this environment variable: WEBSITE_SITE_NAME.
!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("WEBSITE_SITE_NAME"))
The content for this will be the name of your site.
To see more environment variable that you have under your site go to the following link: https://{sitename}.scm.azurewebsites.net/Env
You cannot (easily).
With azure Web Sites, your site runs in an IIS. RoleEnvironment will always be false, because it is not initialized there. Look at Azure Web Sites more like a regular hosting. Can you tell if your website is running in XYZ Hosting, or in your own IIS?
One thing that you could consider is the Application Settings in your web.config (yes, the appSettings section) and have some setting indicating whether you run on WebSites or not. Read the full article here about App Settings in Azure WebSites to understand what I mean. In short: if you set a setting value via the portal, it will take precedence over what is in web.config. You can even just set it in the Portal, not having it in your web.config.
I'm trying to make a service to more easily configure configuration values on Azure applications. Right now, if I want to change a setting that it the same over 7 different environments, I have to change it in 7 different .cscfg files.
My thought is I can create a webservice, that the application will query for its configuration values. The webservice will look in a storage place, like Azure Tables, and return the correct configuration values.
I've been able to integrate this into a deployment script pretty easily (package the app, get the settings, change the cscfg file, deploy). The problem with that is every time you want to change a setting, you have to redeploy.
Finally the question - Is there a way I can retrieve the configuration settings after the application starts, on role start? It would of course need a base set of settings for the app to start. Retrieving the settings from the web service on application start would be good. Any way that I don't have to redeploy the application and that it will retrieve them automatically will work.
Thanks in advance!
Just use the .cscfg for the minimum set (common to all environment) of configurable settings. The use your web services for rest of the configurations. And don't modify your .cscfg. Just have a settings provider that retrieves settings from web service (via polling or message signalling - pub/sub model). And have a reinitialize settings procedure in place for this settings provider and all the services/components that rely on configurable settings.