Azure web sites with Paket

Whoever worked with Microsoft Shop knows about nuget. It is a package manager for anything and everything related to .Net. And it is getting better and better with versions coming in. But again it is nowhere near the maturity needed to work with projects having many small projects. Things get cranky soon.

Now, there is a better option as per my opinion called Paket. Very easy to get started. And so damn reliable. A couple more commands to learn but I guess it is ok. It cleans up most of the mess of nuget. And the best thing—no XML.

Now, I normally throw anything and everything to Azure websites. Just do experiments and it's free. Mostly I put projects in Github and pull them into Azure. Easiest way to test something or anything which needs network.

Now, you can have Paket instead of nuget with minimum changes. There is a detailed article written by Scott Hanselman that you can find.

But for your existing or new web project, what are the minimum requirements?

You need to create .deployment in the root of your project. It will tell Azure's build system to not go with defaults. (I guess the build system is called Kudu.)

In that file, copy and paste the code below:

[config]
command = build.cmd

Two lines to tell it to use build.cmd to build the project.

Now, we obviously need the build.cmd file in root.

And here is the code:

@ECHO OFF
setlocal

echo ====== Restoring packages... ======

if not exist .paket\paket.exe (
  .paket\paket.bootstrapper.exe
)

.paket\paket.exe restore

if not %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 (
  echo ====== Failed to restore packages. ======
  exit 1
)

echo ====== Building... ======

msbuild /p:Configuration=Release

if not %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 (
  echo ====== Build failed. ======
  exit 1
)

if not "%DEPLOYMENT_TARGET%" == "" (
  echo ====== Deploying... ======
  xcopy /y /e <project name> "%DEPLOYMENT_TARGET%"
)

The code is very much self-explanatory.

First, pull the latest paket.exe, then restore packages. msbuild is there, so just use it. And the age-old xcopy to copy built files to the deployment target.

Bang! It's done. You can check things out with the log tail or console on the Azure portal.

If you want to go a little bit advanced and want kind of a build system, then you can always try FAKE. But if you're in a great hurry and don't want to waste time with nuget issues, go for Paket.

Happy Packaging!!!