Azure Node.js Visual Studio Publishing Error

Been doing a lot of Node.js of late as well as publishing to Azure. There are a couple kinks that I’ll share.

Issues Publishing Node Website to Azure From Visual Studio

First and foremost by far the easiest way to publish to Azure is probably WebMatrix 3. It’s rather idiot proof. Unfortunately its not nearly as intuitive to develop in as Visual Studio is. At least I don’t like it. If you’re in VS a lot you’ll probably feel the same. However with that said WebMatrix does a few things for you automatically. It also seems to ignore a glarring issue you’ll find in VS and that is the length of file paths. This is due to the structure of nesting in the node_modules directory for all your modules. Mongoose for one has an example folder that you’ll need to hide or exclude. If you open the folder as a web site you won’t have the exclude like you normally would in a VS project, hence the easiest way I found was to mark this folder as hidden directly from Explorer. For me this is no big deal as I always have hidden folders shown. I’m always monkeying with “C:\sers\profile\AppData” folder for one reason or another among others so I always have hidden files/folders set as visible.

Mark Folder as Hidden

Simply open the parent directory and right click on the folder you want to hide, select hidden

Once this is completed Visual Studio will ignore this directory when publishing

Mark Folder as Hidden