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.
Related
Every guide that I see say to do something with the web.config file in Azure. However, no matter how much I Google, there is nowhere to be found the steps that I need to take to find the web.config file. Your help will be highly appreciated :)
There are a few scenarios here. First: when you run on an App Service there is a web.config file. As David Makagon said, it's not accessible through the portal. By default, app services have Kudu available. One of the things this gives you is something like a file explorer. To access Kudu for an App Service with URL https://someapp.azurewebsites.net, go to https://someapp.SCM.azurewebsites.net.
A second thing you could do (which is part of Kudu) is use the App Service Editor. This is an online editor that looks very much like Visual Studio Code. Go to https://someapp.scm.azurewebsites.net/dev.
The third thing: if you have any settings in your web.config that you want to manage without updating the configuration file, have a look at the Application Settings. Any setting that's in there overrides the setting with the same name in the web.config.
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.
In IIS you can create an Application on a site so now I want to try and accomplish the same on Azure Cloud Service:
tenant.mysite.com - One Cloud Service
tenant.mysite.com/api - Another Cloud Service
The reason I want it done like this is cause this is a multi-tenant site and the api needs to be called with the tenants URL.
Is there any way out the box to do this with Azure? Am I looking at the whole solution wrong or do I have to look into doing a proxy of sorts?
I did host the application similar to what you have did.
There are a few points that you will need to take care of
1. Overlapping sections of web.config file should be locked using <location path='.'.... > tags
2. Proper references for the dlls to be given
This is easily achieved in both the Azure websites and Azure Cloud Services. The link that explains how you can get started is given below. Post questions if you have tried this and run into some issues.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tomholl/archive/2014/09/22/deploying-multiple-virtual-directories-to-a-single-azure-website.aspx
I will be placing an Azure website, in several regions. Then configuring the Azure Traffic Manager to distribute requests to each region.
The website needs to know which region it is running in. Is there an API available to determine this? Or, is my only choice, to define a REGION app setting, that is set appropriately for each Azure website?
I had the same question today, and found this thread. It seems that Web Apps now do include the promised environment variable showing the region in which they are deployed.
I simply used:
string region = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("REGION_NAME");
and it worked fine (note that it returns null when run outside Azure e.g. in Visual Studio).
I got a response, to my question, on the Microsoft Azure DNS and Traffic Manager forum.
The answer was:
There's no handy way currently. In the Azure Powershell, you could use Get-AzureWebsite to read the WebSpace value, which is structured as Region+"webspace".
For now it's easier to just add it to the app setting, like you suggested. We'll have the region value as an environment variable in a later release.
So, as suggested, we will just use an app setting to tell the website what region it is running in. We will switch over, to the environment variable, when it becomes available.
I have to deploy my (old school) application to Azure using the Web deployment tools/Azure Web Accelerator. I'm not an Azure pro and I havn't set up the whole Azure Publishing enviroment.
Still i can publish my application with Visualstudio to Azure. Never the less when I try System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["setting"] I get an empty value.
Local on the webapplication I get a value.
So I know that 'RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable' is true and localy isn't still that's the only lead I have. Any help is welcome
Thanks guys but I've fixed it. It's quite simple after all. The Azure Web Accelerator was configured at url service.test.com the site which couldn't read the web.config was a the same base url only a virtual application like service.test.com/shop.
When I changed the service.test.com/shop to run at testshop.shopname.com everything worked. So basicly you can't run both web app/sites on the same url.
If it's OK when using the local simulator? You could RDP to your windows azure virtual machine to have a look on the web.config directly. About how to use RDP on windows azure please have a look
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg443832.aspx
http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2010/12/03/remote-desktop-to-your-azure-virtual-machine.aspx