Parse Server on Managed Azure Services

Your parse server is running at https://<yoursite>.azurewebsites.net/parse.

Your parse dashboard is running at https://<yoursite>.azurewebsites.net/parse-dashboard

• username: <appId>
• password: <masterKey>

Developing Remotely

Use Visual Studio Online, a free web app site extension, to modify your deployed site code at https://<yoursite>.scm.azurewebsites.net/dev. You may need to install VSO onto your web app via tools->Visual Studio Online. Filewatching is enabled by default, so any changes that you make to your javascript/configuration files will automatically trigger a site restart to pick up the changes. Be careful if you deploy to the site as your remote changes may be overwritten!

Developing Locally

You can easily interact with the deployed parse server code via git. Clone the web app repository locally with git clone https://<yoursite>.scm.azurewebsites.net/<yoursite>.git. Pushing to the remote repository will automatically trigger a deployment. Be careful not to overwrite changes that you have made remotely with a git deployment!

If you want to setup specific configuration for your app, add it to config.js or local.js. local.js changes will be ignored from git, so it's a good placed to add secrets while developing locally.

Updating Dependencies

If you want to upgrade to a newer version of parse-server, parse-dashboard, or other modules, there are a few steps:

• set an appsetting WEBSITE_NODE_DEFAULT_VERSION to 6.9.4
• use kudu console to run npm install <package>@<version>.

We recommend testing these upgrades on a development instance or locally before modifying your production site. If you want to move to the next major version of parse-server or parse-dashboard you'll need to modify your site package.json, as ^major.minor.patch versioning only allows installing a package of the same major version.

Troubleshooting

Logging specific parse-server configuration:

• Verbose parse-server logging: add an app setting to your web app 'VERBOSE' equal to 'true', or add to your server configuration verbose: 'true'
• Database driver logging (very verbose!): add require('mongodb-core/lib/connection/logger')('dummy', { loggerLevel: 'debug' }); before you initialize parse server

To see your logs, check:

• The Logs tab of the parse dashboard
• Web App diagnostic logging

Useful tools:

• F12 developer tools (are the requests to parse server from the dashboard failing?)
• Postman / Fiddler (execute rest calls against parse server / intercept traffic)
• node-inspector (debug your app locally or remotely)

######Parse Dashboard Issues The parse dashboard used to be located in a site extension with route https://<yoursite>.scm.azurewebsites.net/parse-dashboard. It is now an express app running on the main web site at route https://<yoursite>.azurewebsites.net/parse-dashboard. A username (appId) and password (masterKey) are required. The dashboard can take a long time to load due to cold starts.

######Push Issues The notification hub needs to be at least basic tier in order to send push notifications.

######DocDB There have been known issues with the DocumentDB dropping mongo connections. A server restart will typically fix the problem. We are working to resolve the problem.

Useful Links

• App Links
  • Parse Server: https://<yoursite>.azurewebsites.net/parse
  • Parse Dashboard: https://<appId>:<masterKey>@<yoursite>.azurewebsites.net/parse-dashboard
  • Online Code Editor: https://<yoursite>.scm.azurewebsites.net/dev
  • Web App Git Repository: https://<yoursite>.scm.azurewebsites.net/<yoursite>.git
• Azure Documentation
  • Parse Server on Managed Azure Services
  • Blog Post
• Github Repositories
  • parse-server
  • parse-dashboard
  • parse-server-azure-storage
  • parse-server-azure-push
  • parse-server-azure-config
  • Deployed app
• Azure Infrastructure
  • Web Apps
  • DocumentDB
  • Storage
  • Notification Hubs