Tyler's Azure Blog - Harp on Azure Web Apps

Recently I have been trying out different frameworks like Ghost running on Azure Web Apps. I was trying to get away from just the standard ASP.NET or PHP solutions, branching out to Node.js or static site generators (more to come on that).

Harp

Harp is a Node.js / npm web platform that uses common template formats like Jade and Markdown to make it easier to author pages. Rather than providing a user interface for authoring, the process flow includes editing local files for content and layout.

Harp seems to be both a Static Site Generator and a Node.js hosting platform. For the purposes of this post I will be going through how to run Harp as a hosting platform.

Initialize Harp directory
```
 harp init my-harp-app
 cd my-harp-app
```

Initialize your app as a Git repo

 git init
 git commit -am "initial commit"

Create a new Azure Web App
Enable Continuous Deployment with a Local Git Repository
Copy the repository clone url and add it as a remote repository
```
 git remote add azure https://user@my-harp-app.scm.azurewebsites.net:443/my-harp-app.git
```
Note: my-harp-app will be replaced by your site name.

Add package.json and server.js

 {
  "name": "harpapp",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "private": true,
  "dependencies": {
    "harp": "0.19.0"
  },
  "engines": {
    "node": "4.1.x",
    "npm": "3.5.1"
  }
 }

Then, use Node Package Manager to install the dependencies:
```
 npm install
```

Next, create server.js, which should contain the following:

 require('harp').server(__dirname, { port: process.env.PORT || 5000 })

Create a iisnode.yaml file which should contain the following
```
 node_env: production
```
Commit any changes to Git
```
 git commit -am "adding node files"
```
Deploy your Harp app to Azure
```
 git push azure master
```

At this point your site should be running on Azure at http://my-harp-app.azurewebsites.net, but with the subdomain you specifed instead of my-harp-app.

This article shows you how to create and deploy your Harp application to Azure using the Azure Command Line Interface (azure-cli) tool.

Stay tuned for more articles on web platforms and static site generators like middleman, Jekyll, Hexo, and more.

Thanks for reading.

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