How to swap between staging and production on Azure Websites (video + tutorial)

Time for another Azure Website post. This time I’ve gone the extra mile and even recorded a video, hope you like it :)

I’ll keep the writing to a minimum, watch the video if you need more ‘talk’, personally I like ‘scrollable’ posts when it’s just a simple thing being demonstrated. No need to add more words just for the SEO, hate it when people do that.

Anyway.

Staging is the concept of testing an application in a production mirrored environment before moving the site to production. Not a bad idea, right?

Azure Websites makes this easy for us with the current in-beta feature.

First of all, create a new Website.

Compute => Web Site => Quick Create => Name & region

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Select the website once it has been created, and under Dashboard select Enable staged publishing.

clip_image004 It will prompt us to change the application mode to Standard, from Free. We’ll have to do that. Once that is done click the same link again.

This will create a second site under the first site with ‘(staging)’ in the name

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Both sites have the same default look since we haven’t deployed anything yet.

In Visual Studio (I’m using the free version, express, for this demonstration).

To publish go back to the Dashboard of the staging site, and download the Publishing profile.

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IN Visual Studio right click on the project and select Publish. Under profile select import and browse for the file. It should get all the settings it needs, so go ahead and click Publish afterwards.

WE have now the application on the staging site but not production. To swap, to either site and click on Swap in the menu.

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Once you have done that the sites have swapped the two sites will have swapped place.

And that is that. Neat, isn’t it? In a few days I’ll post a video and blog post on deploying via a local Git repository when you do a push. Also very cool bananas. Waiting for some super comments, feedback, tips and tricks or just some love.

Comments

Really cool info indeed. I started with Azure a week ago and i didnt knew about this feature. Will start using it for sure.

About the video and audio - Nice quality, good volume, nice balance between on-screen and youself talking to the camera. ~5:29 you show both sites but we cannot see the URLs.

Good luck and keep up spreading your good material :) 

Last modified on 2014-02-04