Publishing NopCommerce 2.0 to Azure

 

So if you haven’t heard, NopCommerce is great open source project for e-commerce type sites. The latest version is rewritten in ASP.NET MVC, so you don’t need to bother with WebForms anymore.

I thought, that since it’s codebase was changed from 1.9 version it should also work very easily on Azure platform. But unfortunately that is not the case. If you take a close look at how nopCommerce works, you’ll see, that it needs write permissions for configuring connection string (actually it is stored in Settings.txt file in App_Data folder). I will not argue if that’s good or not, we just need to port it to Azure, that’s all :)

So for the first step, we need to deploy app on a local machine to get a full database. With a standard “Import and Export Data Wizard”, which you get with SQL Server installation, you can transfer database from local SQL Server instance to Azure based (read more on how to configure SQL Azure in this short tutorial). For more info on how to do a transfer, referrer to this great article on Microsoft TehNet Wiki.

So, when you’re done with configuring database, we’ll need to customize a bit NopCommerce. First of all, download version with source and open it in Visual Studio. You’ll need to have Azure SDK installed on your machine. You can add new empty Azure project in NopCommerce Solution and after it’s added, right click on Roles folder and choose Add>Web Role Project in solution. Add Nop.Web and that’s it for Azure configuration.

Now here comes tricky part – you need to include a few more folders in Nop.Web solution – that is folder Administration and folder Plugins. That’s because Visual Studio packages only folders included in project. After you’ve done that, you’ll also need to add a few more Refereces – try to build the project and check which references are missing.

One more thing before you’ll be able to upload to Azure – we need to change where Connection string is stored. I choose Web.config, where you need to add two new keys in appSettings section:

    <add key="DataProvider" value="sqlserver"/>
    <add key="DataConnectionString" value="Server=tcp:sth.database.windows.net,1433;
              Database=nopcommerce;User ID=username@sth;Password=your_pwd;
              Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True;"/>

and after that, you’ll also need to edit DataSettingsManager.cs (found in Data folder in Nop.Core project), where you’ll simply delete content of SaveSettings() function and replace LoadSettings() with:

public virtual DataSettings LoadSettings()
{
    var ret = new DataSettings();
    ret.DataProvider = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["DataProvider"];
    ret.DataConnectionString = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["DataConnectionString"];
    return ret;
}

And if you’re lucky enough, NopCommerce should be ready and published after Visual Studio does it’s magic of uploading/starting Azure instance.

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author: Aleš Rosina | Comments: 6 | Tags: nopcommerce-azure