Azure Site Extensions

Overview

By this time, we assume you have created the Azure WebSites and using its companion SCM (aka. Kudu) endpoint to do git publishing or various tasks. This SCM endpoint can be viewed as Site Extension of the actual user main site. It is intended for site owner and is protected by basic authentication. You may not realize that you can also do much more things with Site Extension endpoint such as getting diagnostic dump, log stream or the DebugConsole for remote shell interaction with the actual file contents.

Out of the box, Windows Azure provides one Site Extension (which is Kudu). All builtin Site Extensions are installed at d:\Program Files (x86)\SiteExtensions. For instance, the below is Kudu Site Extensions file layout.

d:\
    Program Files (x86)
        SiteExtensions
            Kudu
                extension.xml
                1.24.12345.67
                    applicationHost.xdt
                    kudu bits...
                1.24.34567.89-preview
                    applicationHost.xdt
                    kudu bits...

The extension.xml indicates what version to be used by default. Good news is each site can overwrite the version by specifying <extension>_EXTENSION_VERSION in AppSettings. For above example, we have 2 versions of Kudu in different (semver)[http://semver.org/] folders. The default version is latest which means using any latest version excluding preview/beta (in this case, 1.24.12345.67). However, if you want to try beta or preview version, you may set KUDU_EXTENSION_VERSION to beta and it will look for latest including such. Other available versions include disabled if you want to disable this extension as well as specific semver if you only want to use specific version.

ApplicationHost Config Transformation

Private Extensions