How to publish dotnetnuke website to azure?

Question

I am looking at migrating a dotnetnuke website to Azure. I need both staging and production versions of the site to be running.

I have looked at using Azure Websites, but at the moment there is no support for SSL on custom domains so this can't be used for the production website. I have migrated the staging site to an Azure Website and now have numerous options for publishing updates (ftp, git, using web matrix).

Due to the constraints of Azure Websites, I used the DNN Accelerator to create a cloud service for the production environment. This set up will allow me to have control over IIS and therefore manage SSL certificates (I think).

The problem I have with this is there does not seem to be any publishing options. The only way I can publish is by connecting to the Azure instance via RDP and then copying the website files onto the files system.

Are there any other ways of publishing? I have looked at converting the website to a WAP, but I believe this has implications when it comes to updating to new DNN versions.

Sandrino Di Mattia Sandrino Di Mattia · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-27T10:45:46

You should never publish your application through RDP since these changes are non-persistent (meaning what you published might disappear after a hardware failure / ...). Adding new instances would also mean that these instances don't have the files you published before.

I suggest you start by looking at the DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator first. If this doesn't fit your needs you might always try to build something yourself, but if you want to say with a regular website and not a web application I wouldn't count on Visual Studio support. In that case you might want to look at creating a package from the command line and using startup scripts to add your website in IIS.

How to publish dotnetnuke website to azure?

2 Answers