Umbraco on Azure: can I change hostname? - content-management-system

I've deployed in Windows Azure a website made with Umbraco, using
Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco.
For development and test i used a test Hostname. Now it's time to switch to the official DNS hostname..
How can I change current hostname?
Actually i configured hostname at deployment time (the only way i know to do this) but i can't deploy again, since many files have been changed working on website on Azure.
EDIT
Let me explain: at the step prompt in the image (during web site deploying) I used as Domain Name "test.mywebsite.com", and configured real DNS.
Now the website is configured, so I'd like to make mywebsite.com point to that site;
But is'nt enough if i configure mywebsite DNS! Shall I deploy again? An will I lose any of the changes I made?

I'd like to make two comments on your question:
1) In order to host your Azure application under a custom host name, you will need to sign up with a DNS provider that supports C-NAME records (most do). I suggest someone like GoDaddy.com because by default C-NAME records can only resolve your "www.domainname.com" records and cannot do anything for queries where "www." is dropped from the URL. DNS providers like GoDaddy also have an option to redirect all traffic destined for "domainname.com" to a URL of your choice. This is a huge deal for Azure apps. Frankly speaking, it is somewhat disappointing that for all the PaaS and IaaS features of Azure, DNS was not included in the overall package.
2) I am a little worried when you say that you can no longer redeploy your app due to the changes made. Can you elaborate on that? Have you made changes to the application's code running on VM's in Azure without going through redeployment process? If so, this is a huge no-no. Your VM's running in Azure are not "permanent". Microsoft and your redeployment process can (and will) re-stage those VM's to the original package at any given time. Microsoft will re-image your VM's at least once a month during their monthly OS upgrades. But they can also do so when they need to move your VM to another rack, etc. Whatever changes that you make to your app must be either stored in source-control before deployment or in a permanent storage facility like SQL Azure, Azure Storage, etc.
HTH

Finally i think that the answers to my questions are:
-Shall I deploy again? Yes, i must deploy again
-Will I lose any of the changes I made? Many changes will be mantained since are stored into DB. But I have to do many activities to make new website work!
This answer confirms my theory:
In my case, I created and uploaded a site with a name, let's say
http://www.contoso.com and then paid a domain from a registrar let's say
http://www.example.com, when I mapped
http://MyAcceleratorsService.cloudapp.net/ to my new domain
( http://www.example.com ) and tried to open that domain I got the home page of
the Accelerator and not the uploaded site.
I had to upload the site again to Azure (using UploadUmbracoSite.cmd
from Accelerator application) and when uploading enter the same domain
name as the one I registered: http://www.example.com. Then, I was able to
browse my uploaded site as expected.
As for your question, will upload site again using
UploadUmbracoSite.cmd (is in the Setup folder) and will enter the new
domain name when requested.
Exactly what I was trying to avoid.. but the only solution, i suppose.
Well it was not easy to publish again, i got errors of many type (i suppose tied to some components that i've installed after deploy and that are not installed in new deployed website).. i'm going to solve them.
Edit
Completed my work:
- loads of different attempts, no-one worked
- CTP backup of DB
- deleted DB and website
- new full deploy of umbraco
- CTP restore of DB
finally:
-all work on content is OK
-all work on styles, pages, templates is lost
Changing hostname is hard; dont'use test hostname but definitive hostname from the beginning.
If anyone has suggest, i'll be pleased to test it, anyway

This is not really an answer to your question, but it might be a solution to your problem: Use a CNAME record to make the production DNS name point to your development name. E.g. www.productionname.com will the point to www.testname.com. I am not sure if everything will just work out of the box, but it seems to be worth a try.
This requires, that your hosting provider allows you to set up CNAME records.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNAME_record

Related

Automate publishing .NET Core App to multiple subdomains

I have a .NET Core application used by many clients. Each client has its own subdomain. Each client has its own database. All databases are identical. Different data, same schema. The subdomains and database names look something like this.
client1.myapp.com Client1Db
client2.myapp.com Client2Db
client3.myapp.com Client3Db
I use Visual Studio Web Deploy to publish. For each client, I have publishing-settings.
Each set of publishing-settings specifies the proper subdomain, the database name for that subdomain, and the Entity Framework Migration Info for the subdomain. (See images below)
I end up with a list of .pubxml files in my VisualStudioSolution\Properties\PublishProfiles folder that looks kind of like this...
client1.myapp.com.pubxml
client1.myapp.com.pubxml.user
client2.myapp.com.pubxml
client2.myapp.com.pubxml.user
client3.myapp.com.pubxml
client3.myapp.com.pubxml.user
It was not a big deal to publish these individually when I only had a few subdomains to publish, but now I'm getting enough clients that it is becoming a pain.
Can someone recommend a way to automate this process? I'm not even sure where to start. Thanks!
You may use a DevOps pipeline in which you can use, for example "Jenkins X" and deploy a single app to multiple servers.
You can start with: Jenkins jobs in multiple servers
There is others CD (continuous delivery) platforms and services, but this question have better place in devops.stackexchange

Deploy code to multiple production servers under the load balancer without continuous deployments

I am the only developer (full-stack) in my company I have too much work other than automating the deployments as of now. In the future, we may hire a DevOps guy for the same.
Problem: We have 3 servers under Load Balancer. I don't want to block 2nd & 3rd servers till the 1st server updated and repeat the same with 2nd & 3rd because there might be huge traffic for one server initially and may fail at some specif time before other servers go live.
Server 1
User's ----> Load Balancer ----> Server 2 -----> Database
Server 3
Personal Opinion: Is there a way where we can pull the code by writing any scripts in the Load Balancer. I can replace the traditional Digital Ocean load balancer with Nginx Server making it a reverse proxy.
NOTE: I know there are plenty of other questions asked in Stack
Overflow on the same but none of them solves my queries.
Solutions I know
GIT Hooks - I know somewhat about GIT Hooks but don't want to use it because if I commit to master branch by mistake then it must not get sync to my production and create havoc in the live server and live users.
Open multiple tabs of servers and do it manually (Current Scenario). Believe me its pain in the ass :)
Any suggestions or redirects to the solutions will be really helpful for me. Thanks in advance.
One of the solutions is to write ansible playbook for this. With Ansible, you can specify to run it per one host at the time and also as the last step you can include verification check that checks if your application responds with response code 200 or it can query some endpoint that indicates the status of your application. If the check fails, Ansible will stop the execution. For example, in your case, Server1 deploys fine, but on server2 it fails. The playbook will stop and you will have servers 1 and 3 running.
I have done it myself. Works fine in environments without continuous deployments.
Here is one example

Sophos UTM VPN not accessible

I used the Sophos UTM 9.510 ha_standalone Cloudformation template (https://github.com/sophos-iaas/aws-cf-templates/blob/master/utm/9.510/standalone.template) and used defaults when possible. I did not use an existing ElasticIP, so it created it's own at (scrubbed) 50.12.12.123.
I gave a hostname at (for example) vpn.example.com and after creation, I created an A record for vpn.example.com to point to 50.12.12.123.
I don't have a license and just pay hourly for the AMI.
I understand that I should be able to hit https://vpn.example.com:4444 or https://50.12.12.123:4444 to see the admin panel. However, it times out and doesn't load anything.
When I deployed the stack, I got an email at the admin email I provided and it said REST daemon not running - restarted. I assume it restarted fine, since I have received no new emails, and the EC2 instance is running.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a step I'm missing? Aside from creating the Route53 record, I thought the Cloudformation Template should just work right out of the box.
The default security groups blocked traffic. I modified one of them to accept all traffic and the dashboard became accessible. I will now refine access further.

With firebase hosting how do I change the domain name

I have previously configured firebase hosting successfully but now want to change the domain name I am using.
It appears you can Edit the current domain name but this doesnt seem to do anything that I can see when I enter a new domain name.
Not sure how to proceed.
Thanks,
Craig.
So I sent an email to firebase support and this process involves removing your current domain and adding a new domain which involves some downtime whilst they procure a new SSL certificate, etc.
If anyone is attempting to do this and does not want to incur any downtime its not too difficult. The highlevel process I have followed to move from olddomain.com to newdomain.com without downtime is detailed below:
Procure another temp server (i.e. amazon or whatever) and bring up nginx
Deploy your static files (css, js, html, jpg, etc) to this temporary server
Procure a cert for olddomain.com and deploy it on your server. You can get some free ones for a month if you have a search (dont want to endorse any particular product here)
Ensure the site is running as olddomain.com on your temp server (hack you hosts file to force your domain name to point at the new temp server.
If all good, modify your DNS for olddomain.com so it points at your temp server.
Wait a few hours to ensure all traffic going to your temp server (look at w3c style logs to ensure traffic is coming in)
You can now safely remove your olddomain.com and setup newdomain.com under firebase hosting without losing traffic to olddomain.com
Once newdomain.com setup and running on firebase hosting, configure olddomain.com to do a redirect to newdomain.com. May want to leave this up for a while depending upon how much traffic you are expecting to olddomain.com.
Job done without any downtime :)
Hope these steps are of use to others.
Thanks.
I created a new project with the desired domain name, then switched to the new project using the firebase use <project_id> command from Firebase CLI.

Windows Azure production vs staging server and Facebook integration

We use Windows Azure Cloud services to host our application. One of the great features of Windows Azure is the Production/Staging model. You can have the clients of your application routed to your production server, while you can test your new code running on a staging server. For example, you can configure Azure to point a production server to http://www.coolapp.com while designating a staging server for the same app to something like this: http://7f8e9d5ba73a4f7ea9ebd65a02ee195d.cloudapp.net.
Physically both of these servers are publicly facing. If you were to know the cryptic URL of a staging server you would be able to browse to the app just as easily as you would browse to www.coolapp.com. However, the presence of a GUID in the URL makes it virtually impossible for someone to guess it, thus making the staging server "private". This gives a nice mechanism to the developers of an application to deploy and test the new bits on a staging server before releasing them to public. Once they make sure that things look good, with a flip of a switch they swap the two servers, making staging server a production server and vice versa.
This model creates a small problem for us in relation to Facebook integration. To be able to integrate Facebook plugins you have to register your app with them. FB will then issue an AppId and an AppSecret keys. These keys are tied to the URL of your application. So in order for my app to work with FB plugins I need to obtain one set of keys that is tied to 7f8e9d5ba73a4f7ea9ebd65a02ee195d.cloudapp.net, and another set that is tied to www.coolapp.com.
When I read about Windows Azure, they really urge developers to treat staging vs. production servers as the same. The only difference between them should be the URL. In other words, Azure does not recommend basing your app logic on which server the code happens to be running on as Azure has no inherent knowledge of this. Staging vs. production is just a handy "abstraction" if you will. I guess you see the problem here. In our example above, I have to use one set of keys issued by FB versus another depending on which URL (production vs. staging) my app is running at. I assume I am not the first one running into this problem. What are the correct ways of handling this? One obvious way is to sniff the URL property of the Request object and branch my logic that way. However, intuition tells me this is a hack. Any other ideas?
Regards,
Archil
The mechanisms I know of are:
using "production" within a totally separate service account to "testing" - this leaves "staging" within the production service to be used as an area for "deployment candidates" and provides a separate clean testing domain with a non-changing URL for earlier "dev and test" work.
using different .cscfg files for staging and production - and being careful to update this .cscfg before you do any live switching.
sniffing the incoming URL - as you suggest
Personally, I use the first of these techniques - its easy and it helps prevent nasty accidents
As an aside, one of the techniques we've used for "removing" the Guid from staging is to CNAME the Guid with a really short TTL on the DNS - this allows us to quickly and automatically update the CNAME record for the staging server when we deploy.