Setting up an Azure App Service on Windows requires:
- A server.js file
- An accurate npm
start task in your packages.config.
server.js
You can refer to an older basic version or the new 1.x examples for different node servers. These examples demonstrate how to use
const port = process.env.PORT || 3000
, where
process.env.PORT is a default environment variable set by Azure.
You may also consider adding an app setting in the portal for your app named PORT to override the default environment variable if needed, although Azure likely hosts on specific ports they are familiar with and expose willingly.
npm start task
Execute node server.js, or simply remove the task altogether as Azure (particularly on Windows) automatically runs it.
Automated deployments
I configured git deployment for my app to deploy automatically when I push commits to the master branch. I had to create a custom post-deployment script to execute the necessary npm tasks. You can follow my gist instructions for guidance. While written for Windows, you can adapt a default post-deploy Linux script and include the required customizations as I did.