---
layout: post
title: Running on Azure
date: 2014-03-30 11:00:00
category: Web Servers
permalink: /blog/2014/03/30/
---

Publishing a Node-based site to [Azure](http://azure.com) was painless, thanks to their friendly web portal and
GitHub integration.  Getting a fully operational site, however, took a bit more time.

Unfortunately, because Azure's underlying server technology is Windows-based (IIS), some of the same Windows/Unix
portability problems that have plagued us for decades still plague us today: **carriage returns** and **backslashes**.

Even though all PCjs text files in my project contain only linefeeds, IIS would serve them up with CR/LF
instead.  I first noticed this on the client side, when an XML file retrieved via *XMLHttpRequest()* came back
full of CR/LFs, and later on the server side, when *fs.readFile()* returned a Markdown file filled with CR/LFs.

I wondered if the CR/LF transformation had happened when Azure pulled all my files from GitHub, because
while I can understand some whitespace inconsistencies across web servers, I would never expect file system calls
on the server to modify file contents.

I finally confirmed that the files were indeed modified on the server, by using Azure's FTP browser.  For example,
[us83-buttons-minimal.xml](/devices/pcx86/keyboard/us83-buttons-minimal.xml) is currently 622 bytes locally, but on the
Azure server, the reported size is 632 bytes -- one extra CR for each of the file's 10 lines.  After a little more
digging, I [learned something new](http://git-scm.com/book/ch7-1.html#Formatting-and-Whitespace) about **Git**: it
has a setting called `core.autocrlf` which, for me on OS X, defaults to `input` (meaning "convert CR/LF to LF on commit
but do NOT convert LF back to CR/LF on check-out").  But Azure apparently sets this to `true`, causing all LFs to be
converted to CR/LF.

Regarding slashes, even when path components contained only slashes, *path.join()* would return paths with
backslashes.  And unfortunately, this behavior varies from Node module to module.  For example, I use the NPM
[glob](https://www.npmjs.org/package/glob) module, and even when the input path to *glob()* contains backslashes,
its output paths do not.

In the process of fixing those portability issues, I also had some trouble getting Azure logging to work as
documented.  Setting `loggingEnabled: true` in **/IISNode.yml** would generate logs in **/site/wwwroot/iisnode/**,
but the logs were numerous and poorly organized.

And the Azure command-line tool that was *supposed* to enable real-time log-streaming to the console:

	azure site log tail pcjs
	
would happily report:

	Welcome, you are now connected to log-streaming service
	
but it would NEVER display anything but deployment information.  Instead, I had to browse the log files using Azure's
"FTP DIAGNOSTIC LOGS" link on the web portal -- which presents the logs as one big, ugly, fragmented mess:
 
![Azure Logs](/blog/images/iisnode-logs.jpg)

Sigh. But at least the site is up and fully operational now.

*[@jeffpar](http://twitter.com/jeffpar)*  
*March 30, 2014*