Publish MVC Web App on Azure Virtual Directory

Azure Web Apps are deployed as a new website on the Azure cloud. For those who have control of the server, this is similar to adding a new website on an IIS server. What if we need to deploy another web app on Azure, but we do not want to create a new web site?  Well the answer is to create a virtual directory and deploy the web app there. Let’s take a look at how we can do that using the Azure management website.  

We start by looking at a Web App that is already deployed on Azure. We need to look at the settings as shown below:

Azure Web App Settings

The image above shows the Virtual application and directories settings. This is the area where we can add a virtual directory that we can later target or use for another deployment. Let’s add a virtual directory named Admin. We will use this for the administration module of the web app. We need to enter the virtual directory name, physical path under wwwroot and check that we want this as an application which we need if we want to allocate the web app to an app pool. We can now save the changes, and the result should look as follows:

Admin Virtual Directory

We are now ready to show how to deploy this. Let's go over Visual Studio, open the solution and take a look at the publishing profile for the original app. Notice the Site Name and Destination URL settings.

Publish Profile Settings

Since we are now deploying to the same web app site and URL, we just need to append the virtual directory information (/Admin) as shown below:

Publish Profile - Virtual Directory

We can now just press the publish button, and we have one Azure web app instance hosting two web apps with one at the wwwroot and the other on the virtual directory off of wwwroot.

I hope this tip provides some insight for your web app deployment strategies on Azure.