How to host FireFox app on Windows Azure

As have mentioned before, among our providers, we use Windows Azure. Within it, there’s the option to host a free web site, which we find it perfectly to host a Firefox OS hosted web app (considering our current traffic). However, given that Azure is based on IIS (you can also have LAMP, but that’s under another modality), little changes have to be made to the web app in order for it to work properly. Namely:

1. Be aware of URL on the manifest
2. Make a web.config file

First lets start with the manifest, specifically the field: url. Assuming your web site is on another address different that the one on Azure, the url field on the manifest file must be:

“url”: “http://name_of_you_azure_website.azurewebsites.net/”

Second -and the most important one-, refers to serving that manifest. Mozilla’s website is well documented regarding on how to serve the manifest.webapp under Apache or NGINX, however there’s no mention on how to do it with IIS. Fortunately, the procedure to accomplish it, is fairly straightforward. In short, you need to create a plain text file called web.config, which must reside on the same directory where you manifest is, and for that matter, your whole website.

The web.config must include the following:

<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<staticContent>
<mimeMap fileExtension=”.webapp” mimeType=”application/x-web-app-manifest+json” />
</staticContent>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>

That’s it! You’re set to host your web app, now you need to pass it through the validator, then submit it to the FireFox marketplace and wait for iy to be release to the public.