Git Deployment Credentials & Adding more users to Git repos on Azure

Create New Site & Enable Git Deployment

As you know you need to use your Live ID sign into Azure portal.  Once you log into the Azure portal you can create a new Web Site by clicking on the “New” command bar at the bottom:

Once your site is created then on the right side under Quick Glance there should see a way to “Set Git Publishing” which will setup your Git Repository and give you a Git URL to push to.   At that time if you have not set up your deployment credential then you will be asked to do so.

Git/FTP Credentials in Azure

If you set your deployment credentials before and do not remember now then you will be able to “Reset deployment credentials” from the Quick Glance section as highlighted below.  Clicking on “Reset deployment credentials” should give you the below screen:

We went back and forth on setting the text on this dialog to be as short and yet as meaningful as we could but I will try to re-iterate it here.  Live id credentials can only be used to sign into Azure portal and not to deploy via Git to Windows Azure Web Sites. For this very reason there are basic auth credentials available per user to be used for deployment. These are basic auth credentials which are used by both FTP and Git and are common for all the sites of the same user. 

When you Set up Git publishing on any site then a Git repository is created specifically for that site and you get a Git repository URL.   Do note that after the repository is setup you also see a “Deployments” tab on the page which contains Git instructions.  

Typical Git URL in Azure looks something like below:

https://vishal@testsitevishal.scm.azurewebsites.net/TestSiteVishal.git

notice that vishal@ is appended in front of the Git site name denoting the user name.  If I had another site called FooBar the URL would look like:

https://vishal@FooBar.scm.azurewebsites.net/FooBar.git

The common part being my user name and when I actually start pushing my site from command prompt the only thing I will need to enter is the password and it will be the same whether I am pushing to FooBar or TestSiteVishal.

I quickly created a Bakery site via WebMatrix 2 and git pushed it to my TestSiteVishal above and my “Deployments” tab now looks as below (notable pieces being my live id and Deployed By field in the deployment history):

When I try to FTP access any of my site the credentials are the same (except in case of FTP the username is usually SiteName\Username i.e. TestSiteVishal\Vishal or FooBar\Vishal)

Additional Deployment Users for your Git Repo

Now let us do a tiny bit of extrapolation here.  A user has single basic deployment credentials for FTP & Git within Azure Web Sites which are applicable to any site that the user has access to.  Any user gets access to Azure Web Sites based on their Azure Subscriptions, so as long as you can add users to Azure Subscription then other users should be able to get access to the same sites and thereby get access to the Git repo of that site as well.  It is possible to add more users to Azure Subscription by making them a co-admin.

So as long as you can make someone as a co-admin on the subscription which has access to the Website with Git Repo then on that user’s dashboard they should see a Git url with their user name and they can use the procedure above to start deploying to that Git Repo.

Setting up a Co-Admin

Setting up a co-admin is relatively simple.  You can go to http://windows.azure.com which is the original Azure silverlight based portal and follow the instructions on MSDN article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg456328.aspx and you should be all set.

If you are being redirected to the new Azure portal at https://manage.windowsazure.com then click on “Preview” in the middle of the title bar as shown below:

which should give you an option to go to the previous portal as shown below:

Once you are in the older Azure portal then click on “Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN”, select the subscription of your choice and click “Add New Co-Admin” on the top Ribbon

which should then allow you to add other co-admins by using their Live Ids as below:

Now the second Live Id account which you added as co-admin should be able to create their own deployment credentials and should be able to use those deployment credentials to Git push to Azure.

When I logged into Azure portal as co-admin (which I just added above) I could see all the sites from the original account and was able to  “Reset deployment credentials” from the dashboard.  Note: Since the co-admin does not know the original users credential the step of “Reset deployment credentials” is an important step for the co-admin.  After doing that when I moved to my “Deployments” tab it looked as below:

Notice that the deployed by is vishal vs. the GitUrl has the user VishalRJoshi

As a co-admin I can now use the Git URL to clone my site locally on a different machine using my own co-admin basic credentials.  Notice the command git clone https://VishalRJoshi@…  below:

 

I made some quick edits to the site and now I am ready to push to Azure again.  As a co-admin I need to add my Azure remote again so I will do so by using the command

git remote add azure https://VishalRJoshi@testSiteVishal…

and then simply git push azure master  and use the new reset deployment credentials.

Finally I can see my change deployed to my Azure site using the co-admin user (notice the Deployed by field now says VishalRJoshi:

I hope this helps you add contributors to you Azure Git repository and you have fun with git pushing to Azure.

/*code awesomely*/

Vishal

Download logs for git push Azure master

When you git push to Azure there is a lot of diagnostic log and trace information is created.  This information is extremely useful for troubleshooting.  So if I was ever to face git push Azure master fail then looking into these is the first place I typically start.

What is also interesting is that since these log files belong to your site “only you (or your co-admin)” can access it.

Below is quick way to get to these files from Azure portal:

On your site dasboard on the right site you should notice “Quick Glance” section

scrolling to the bottom of that you will see Deployment Deployment User and Diagnostics Logs.

Click on the FTP link on the log and when you are asked for credentials enter fully qualified UserName i.e. SiteName\UserName

After doing that navigate to LogFiles/Git/trace/trace.xml

The trace.xml file contains tons of information regarding your git push azure master.  Even if you do not have any failures in your git push to Azure this is still a fascinating file to see as it gives you a ton of information of what is happening under the hood.

//code awesomely

-Vishal

Announcing WebMatrix 2 RC

Yesterday you met open, unified, powerful yet simplified Windows Azure. You can read more about it on Windows Azure Blog or on ScottGu’s blog

In the same spirit and as a great compliment to Windows Azure Web Sites, today I am super excited to announce the Release Candidate of our free web development tool WebMatrix.

Background

WebMatrix is designed to build modern standards based websites as effortlessly as possible. It aims to make your web development workflow easy i.e.

· It lets you get started with Open Source web applications or with built in pretty templates like bakery, personal site, photo galleries, Chat application, Simple CMS etc.

· It comes bundled with a web server so you do not have to configure anything on your machine.

· It has top notch support for web & industry standards like HTML5 , CSS3, JavaScript & jQuery

· It supports server side scripting of your choice - may it be ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js

· It will have built in database management tools for SQL Server or MySQL

· It also has SEO tool & performance optimization tools.

· Finally, it has great publishing tools whether you are using FTP/FTPS or Web Deploy. And now it supports publishing to Windows Azure too!!

Essentially right from getting started till publishing, WebMatrix will make your life easy and will do so for FREE. What is nice is that even after all this it continues to be lightweight installs under 2 minutes (assuming you have .NET 4 which most machines do today).

Installation

Just click the button below and within couple of minutes you should be good to go!!

By downloading and using the Web Platform Installer (WebPI), you agree to the license terms and privacy statement for WebPI. This installer will contact Microsoft over the Internet to retrieve product information

WebMatrix 2 – Web With Benefits

There are already many cool features introduced in WebMatrix 2 Beta (which was released in Sept 2011 at the //build conference). WebMatrix 2 RC release builds on top of Beta and collectively has so many cool new features that it is going to be tough for me to contain myself, although I will try J

HTML5 – WebMatrix now supports code completion for HTML5.

CSS3 – Needless to say also CSS3 code completion

JavaScript – And JavaScript & jQuery code completion as well

ASP.NET - WebMatrix 2 comes with ASP.NET Web Pages 2, which has several improvements over ASP.NET Web Pages 1. Some of my favorites are:

· Dead simple integration with Twitter, Facebook and other oAuth authentication

· Great helpers for embedding maps in your web pages.

· Built in features for User input validation.

You can read more about new ASP.NET WebPages features at – Top Features in Web Pages 2

In addition to runtime features there is a ton of tooling improvement within WebMatrix 2 for ASP.NET. WebMatrix 2 now uses Visual Studio code editors which will makes writing code a real pleasure. You will now have full C#/VB# intellisense within WebMatrix 2 e.g. check out HTML embedded C# intellisense on ASP.NET Web Pages helpers:

In addition to great intellisense on C# & VB WebMatrix 2 now also supports NuGet Gallery

More Awesome Web Stuff –In addition to above Webatrix 2 supports many other modern web goodies like: LESS, SaSS, Coffee Script. Just click Add new item and check out all of these and in fact many more file types supported, you just need to explore J Infact with a tiny bit of exploring you will also see that WebMatrix also provides code completion for LESS and compilation for both LESS & CoffeeScript. I am super jazzed about all this coz I really have wanted to use these features.

     

PHP – WebMatrix 1 always supported PHP but now the support goes even further by providing code completion for PHP functions. This has been one of the top asks on WebMatrix User Voice and so we are excited to finally have this in.

Node.js – One of the big areas of investment in WebMatrix 2 RC was Node.js. We have tons of features coming in for Node.js. Some of my favorite ones are:

Awesome templates - If you have never used Node.js before but have always wanted to WebMatrix 2 is your opportunity. Trust me here and give it a try. Just install WebMatrix 2 from above big green button, go to “Templates” and pick one of the templates below (preferably Starter template)

Just by installing a Node.js template, WebMatrix 2 will install Node.js, NPM, IIS Node, NPM Packages for you and within seconds your machine will feel like a Node developer heaven. The Starter template comes with best practices on writing Node.js application and even gives you taste of some quick “Chat Room” functionality using very popular NPM package Socket.IO.

Node.js Code Completion – WebMatrix supports code completion for core Node modules and functions:

3^rd Party Module Code Completion - Our team has been working with the community to come up with a common format to be able to be able provide you with 3^rd party module code completion and I am super happy to share that we now do have code completion for all 3^rd party modules who have jsdoc support e.g. check out the code completion on Recaptha below:

Jade/EJS Colorization – WebMatrix also supports colorization for Jade files making it friendly for people who love to use Express MVC framework with Node.js. Infact WebMatrix will also support EJS if you prefer that as your view engine.

We have lot more goodies for Node Developers check out post written by Justin on our team: Node.js meets WebMatrix

OSS App Development – OSS Apps have always been one of the top focuses for WebMatrix. In this release we have made even more progress on working with popular OSS apps. Some of my favorite improvements in this space are:

App Install Workflow – We aspired to ask almost zero questions when you install an open source app like WordPress or Joomla. We make the default choices for you and yeah we know that some of you want full control so we enabled full customized install as well.

App Specific Dashboard – With WebMatrix 2 OSS Apps can customize the dashboard content that is shown to us developers. If you want to try out a new app and want to be connected with its community then this serves as a great resource. Check out how Umbraco customizes the WebMatrix dashboard with super useful links (and pretty icons J). Similarly there are several other communities who do the same.

App Specific Code Completion - WebMatrix now goes one step ahead and provides code completion for App Specific function. Check out the WordPress example below. Similarly other OSS apps provide code completion for their functions too.

Needless to mention all ASP.NET apps get code completion just by the virtue of using the same editing surface as Visual Studio!

App Specific File locking – Most apps recommend not to modify their core files which ship with the app coz these files change from one app version to another. It is always a pain point for web developers to know which files are allowed to be modified and which are not. WebMatrix makes this easy by providing the App Specific File Locking feature. When you attempt to modify one of the core files WebMatrix warns you like below:

Mobile Web – We all know Mobile web is huge and we know it is only going to get bigger. With WebMatrix 2 we want you to be able to make your websites mobile enabled easily. To support that below are few top features:

ASP.NET Web Pages – In ASP.NET Web Pages we now have ability to render mobile specific views. The System.Web.WebPages namespace contains classes that let you work with display modes easily.

Node.js – In our Node.js templates we wrote sample code for you to take a look at how you could redirect calls to right views based on user agent of the browser.

Templates – We made all of our templates - ASP.NET, Node.js as well as PHP templates look nice on mobile devices so that you can have samples on how to use meta tags, mobile specific CSS or even different layout and scripts.

ASP.NET Starter Template	Node.js Starter Template	PHP Starter Template

Windows Phone Emulator – We hooked up Windows Phone emulator with WebMatrix so that you can take a look how your site will look like in Windows Phone

iPhone Simulators – Our partners in Electric Plum helped create iPhone Simulator which will allow you to validate your site for iPhone.

And Electric Plum actually did not stop there, they went ahead and even provided iPad Simulator for you as well.

jQuery Mobile – You might already know that we have been huge fans of jQuery project. This time around we used jQuery mobile to make many of our templates mobile enabled. Infact for you to be able to do this with your websites, we now ship jQuery mobile along with our templates and even beyond that we also support code completion for jQuery mobile.

So overall I think when it comes to mobile web you hopefully will not have to look further than WebMatrix 2

Database Management – In WebMatrix 1 we provided support for SQL CE which is a light weight, in memory DB engine which can actually ship with your site (i.e. with SQL CE you will not have to separately buy DBs from your hosting provider, it will just run inside your site process). In addition to that WebMatrix 1 already support for MySQL, MS SQL Server and even migration from SQL CE to SQL Server. In WebMatrix 2 we added more polished features around Data Management, Schema Management as well as Relationships & Keys management. Check out the screenshot below to get an idea around the possibilities.

In WebMatrix 2 we also added hugely requested feature for adding new MySQL and SQL Server DBs to your site, which can then be easily deployed remotely to your hosting provider.

Extensibility – Since WebMatrix is a free tool and even though we are inside Microsoft we are a small team. We thought that if we would make WebMatrix really extensible then hopefully many of the passionate users would help us out in taking the product to even greater heights. For this reason we made WebMatrix 2 extensible. We are already seeing awesome extensions come through like:

The Color Theme Manager which will allow you to change your editor themes by picking from several thousand community themes available on http://studiostyl.es

The iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone simulators/emulators you saw above are WebMatrix extensions too.

There are several other awesome extensions like OrangeBits Compiler(compiles CoffeeScript, LESS, minifies JS, CSS etc), Super Snippets (allows you to create snippets of code to use later), Node Power Tools (Includes integration with Node Inspector, Console window and more fun stuff), Image Viewer (allows you to open images inside WebMatrix) and many more. If I took screenshot of each of those I would probably never finish my post so will leave them to you to explore. WebMatrix has an extension gallery which you can access via the ribbon, do take time and check it out.

WebMatrix Extension Gallery

Most importantly we want you to try out creating a new extension as well so we have great documentation, videos and online site at http://extensions.webmatrix.com

If you are interested in creating an extension please do check out How to Create WebMatrix Extensions

Cloud Integration Whether you are starting to build your site, working on it now or ready to deploy, it is worth checking out the great Cloud integration features that WebMatrix has.

Cloud Enabled Apps - WebMatrix highlights OSS apps in the gallery which are ready to go to cloud (notice the blue border Azure icon around some of them). This will allow you to easily pick Windows Azure ready apps. I took this screenshot early on so there might be many other apps which might be Azure ready now they seem to be pouring in on almost daily basis:

Remote Editing – WebMatrix allows you to edit your site directly on Windows Azure or for that matter any other hosting provider who supports Web Deploy technology. To connect and edit your files remotely on WebMatrix dashboard simply click Open à Remote Site

Seamless Publishing – Even in WebMatrix 1 we supported seamless publish of both your files and databases. WebMatrix 2 takes that experience to Azure and now you can seamlessly deploy your sites to Windows Azure. Check out the screenshot below which is deploying PHP + My SQL site to Windows Azure.

Download from Windows Azure – In this wave of Windows Azure we release Windows Azure Web Sites. As I mentioned earlier WebMatrix is very tightly integrated with Windows Azure Web Sites and when you create a new Website in Windows Azure you will notice the below command bar:

The “WebMatrix” button on the command bar will allow you to install WebMatrix 2 RC if you don’t already have it, it will also upgrade your WebMatrix 1 to WebMatrix 2. Additionally if your Azure site is empty it will allow you to choose from WebMatrix templates or OSS app gallery. If you already have a site in Azure then WebMatrix will detect the type of site it is (e.g. WordPress in screenshot below) and will allow you to make a local copy of it by pulling down the files as well as databases. Even beyond pulling files and databases, WebMatrix will also fix up your app locally so that it can work without need any internet connection and whenever you are ready with your changes and back online again, it will allow you to seamlessly publish back to Azure again.

If lot of this feels unreal I suggest you give it a try by signing up for a FREE Windows Azure account today at http://windowsazure.com (Go to Manage – Create a new WebSite). You can also take a look at the video titled “Windows Azure Web Sites – OSS Apps & WebMatrix” demonstrating the experience here

WebMatrix.com

What I mentioned here is only a fraction of new feature information about WebMatrix 2. There is a ton more information available on http://webmatrix.com/next . Do take time to look at our “How To” documents and videos, I am hopeful that you will find them interesting.

Free Web Hosting

Lot of the above features not only work great in Windows Azure but work really REALLY WELL on FREE HOSTING OFFERS which our partners have put together for you. All these great companies worldwide are bringing you free web hosting so that you can create beautiful websites and easily share them with your friends and family.

These hosting offers are free only for limited set of developers so do not miss out on the opportunity to try them out by clicking them:

User Voice

Just around last September we opened up our User Voice forum and since then we have been getting user asks on several features. I am glad to let you know that just yesterday we marked 67 Feature Requests on User Voice as completed. That does not mean we are not hungry for more, in fact we would love to hear your feedback, if you have feature request please to go to our User Voice and leave a vote/suggestion

Have fun

We made this web development tool for you and we really hope you will love using WebMatrix 2 as much as we loved building it.

/*code awesomely */

Vishal

PS: We now have few WebMatrix team twitter handles which you might want to consider following @vishalrjoshi @justinbeckwith & @webmatrix