App Service Archives - Page 2 of 2

Using Azure Web Site as a reverse proxy

IIS has been supporting reverse proxy configuration since URL Rewrite and Application Request Routing modules were released a few years ago. It is possible to configure an IIS hosted web site to act as a reverse proxy and forward web request to other URL’s based on the incoming request URL path. This is described in details in Reverse Proxy with URL Rewrite v2 and Application Request Routing.

Not too many people know however that the same kind of configuration can be achieved with a web site hosted in Azure Web Sites. This blog post explains the configurations steps to enable that.

For example if I want to forward all the requests that come to https://ruslany.net/proxy/ to some other URL I’ll need to do two things:

Enable proxy functionality in ARR
Add a proxy rewrite rule

Any site hosted in Azure Web Sites has URL Rewrite and ARR enabled. However the proxy functionality is disabled by default in ARR. To enable that we will use the Azure Site Extension XDT transform which will modify the applicationHost.config file for our site and will enable proxy features.

Azure Web Sites – block web access to non-production deployment slots

Windows Azure Web Sites supports Staged Publishing functionality, which allows you to create a staging site slot where you can publish a new version of the website and then test it before swapping to the production environment. By default the non-production deployment slot has its own hostname that you use to test the bits deployed there. Sometimes, however you may want to prevent users from browsing to your non-production deployment slot while you are testing it.

It is relatively easy to configure your site to block the http request if it is deployed to any non-production slot. For example let’s say I have a site ruslany.azurewebsites.net and I created a deployment slot for it and name the slot as ‘staging‘ (it is possible to give custom names to deployment slots now). The hostname for that deployment slot will be ‘ruslany-staging.azurewebsites.net‘. So to prevent access to the deployment slot from anybody except a few allowed IP addresses I can add the following rewrite rule to my site’s web.config file:

Azure Web Sites – Continuous Deployment with Staged Publishing

In the beginning of the year Windows Azure Web Sites team has released a preview of the Staged Publishing functionality. The Staged Publishing allows you to create a staging site slot where you can publish a new version of the website and then test it before swapping to the production environment. This feature together with Continuous Deployment via GitHub, BitBucket or DropBox enables some very powerful deployment scenarios.

However the preview release did not provide the optimal experience for enabling Continuous Deployment (CD) for staging site. User had to configure a non-trivial workaround as described in blog post by Rick Rainey. Recently the Azure Web Sites team has released an update that fixes that problem and makes the setup of the CD with staged publishing very simple. This blog post describes how to enable CD from git repository located on BitBucket.