git deploy to an Azure website has stopped working

Question

I've been successfully using Git deploy (via Kudu) to a couple of Azure websites (e.g., beta/prod) for several months, and it's worked quite well. Starting today, I noticed that when I push to the appropriate respective git branch, my Azure websites will supposedly deploy - i.e., the deploy kicks off, everything builds, all my tests run, and the Azure management portal swears up and down that it's deployed my website - but ... nothing happens. My websites don't change. (Beta and prod pull from different branches of the same git repo, but no matter which I push to, none of the changes included in the latest push show up on either website.)

There are no errors or any other indication of a problem in the logs. The Azure portal detects the git pushes, runs the deployments, and swears that they've happened successfully. But the changes - some very simple ones, i.e., text on a certain page - simply aren't there.

This is the sort of thing that I'd normally contact Azure support for, but my subscription doesn't include tech support :-(. The Azure site recommends asking here on SO, and hence my post.

Any suggestions for further troubleshooting this?

Answer 1

Well, I don't know what was triggering the problem, but resetting the website - by adding a bogus key/value pair to the configuration, and saving it - triggers the website(s) to pick up the changes. Apparently the underlying issue is that the Kudu deploy doesn't seem to be triggering the website to reset itself. I'll add more details in the future if I run into the problem again.

[Edit 2013-10-15 - Today, deploys seem to be working normally again. My guess is that it was some sort of transient Azure bug that's now fixed.]