Deployment credentials

There are three different ways to publish files to an Azure Web Site:

1. git: the main topic of this wiki
2. Web Deploy (also known as MSDeploy)
3. FTP

When it comes to authenticating with these three mechanisms, you cannot use your Live ID credentials (which the protocols can't easily support), but instead need to use deployment credentials.

To make things more interesting, for a given web site, there are actually two sets of deployment credentials that you can use to publish.

User-level credentials

These are the credentials that you choose yourself in the Azure portal. If you're not sure what they are, you can reset them by going into the Dashboard tab for any site and clicking 'Reset deployment credentials' (under quick glance).

These credentials are directly tied to a Live ID, and not to a particular web site. This needs to be emphasized, because the Azure portal UI is a bit confusing, as you need to go under a specific site on order to change them. But changing them under one site affects all of them!

Note that when an Azure subscription has multiple admins/co-admins, each person has their own set of credentials, since they each have a different Live ID.

One key point about the user-level credentials is that since you specifically set them, they are meant to be memorized, and directly typed by the user when needed (e.g. when doing a git push).

Site-level credentials

These are the credentials that are automatically generated for each site. In order to see them, you need to download the 'publish profile', which you can do in the Dashboard tab of a site just above the 'Reset deployment credentials' link we discussed above.

The publish profile is an XML file that contains both WebDeploy and FTP related things. If you glance in there, you will easily locate the credentials. They look like:

• Username: if your site is named 'MyCoolSite', the user name will be '$MyCoolSite'
• Password: some long random string

Note that the multi co-admins scenario does not affect those credentials. All the admins/co-admins will end up with the exact same site-level credentials for a given site (but each site has different ones of course).

And unlike User lever credentials, the site-level credentials are definitely not meant to be memorized (though you're welcome to try!). Instead, they're meant to be used by programs that automates deployment for you (like WebMatrix).

When to use which set of credentials

Typically, you use the user-level credentials for git and FTP, and the site-level credentials for Web Deploy. However, you can use both sets of credentials for all three publishing techniques.

So why would you want to use the big random site-level credentials when doing a git push? Well, you wouldn't. However, there can be scenarios where a tool needs to do this on your behalf, and using the site-level credentials can make a lot of sense there.

Important note about the FTP username

Whether you use user-level or site-level credentials, not that you need to prepend the site name you the username you use for FTP. So you'd have user names that look like this:

• With user-level credentials: MyCoolSite\davidebbo
• With site-level credentials: MyCoolSite$MyCoolSite

See more details about accessing files via ftp.