Setup Continuous Deployment with DropBox on Windows Azure Website

Question

Where I work, our marketing team is looking for a "quick and easy" method up periodically updating some files on a website of ours. I opened my mouth and said "We can use Azure Websites with DropBox!". It all works fine, except that with DropBox, files only deploy if I log into the Azure Portal and click Sync. Needless to say, this is a deal breaker, because the users want to save a file and have everything appear magically.

Is there a way to setup continuous deployments via DropBox on Azure? I don't mind setting up a job to run every 15 minutes to perform a file upload if needed.. but would prefer to avoid that if possible

Thanks In Advance

Answer 1

Currently we don't support the continuous sync with Dropbox. The challenge is the noise and the reliability of the site given those changes. Imagine users naturally modify file by file and Dropbox sync them one at time. You can get into the situation where your site is in transient bad state.

Answer 2

This is not currently possible using the Dropbox integration in Azure Websites. Best option for this is the local git integration, where Azure will provide you a remote git location that you can push to that causes an update.

So that gives you behavior, but not the dropbox behavior you want, as someone would still need to commit and push.

To get that you could look into implement a Git hook to mimick the behavior, where you would auto commit and push when a file changes.

Something like this would give you that behavior, but you'd need to translate to a server-based model.

Git Repo Auto-commit and Push

Alternatively, you can host the site in GitHub or Visual Studio Online and I beleive you get that hook automatically.