Have your website published from the storage to a target server

Before you begin, make sure that you've:

• uploaded to the blob storage, and configured, a website, and
• for Microsoft Azure:
  • prepared,
  • configured the CMS Azure service package, and
  • deployed one or more web roles with it, or
• for Windows Server:
  • prepared and
  • configured the C1 CMSAzureBlobSync tool, and
  • run it as a service

Now you are ready to publish (down-sync) the website from the storage to a target server. For this, you should access the blob storage where your deployment and websites containers are and edit the 'Websites' configuration file.

We recommend that you use CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob Storage for that. (We assume that you've downloaded and installed CloudBerry Explorer and configured it to access the blob storage where you'll be uploading your website to.)

1. Open your blob storage in CloudBerry Explorer.
2. Open the deployment container, then the folder named "Configuration" in it.
3. Download Websites.xml to your local computer.
4. Edit the Websites.xml file locally and add your website information, specifying:
   1. name: the name for your website
   2. storename: the name of the website container where your website files are stored:

      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
      <Websites>
        <Website name="c1website" storename="c1website"/>
      </Websites>

5. Save the changes and upload it back to the blob storage overwriting the existing Websites.xml.

Soon after the Websites.xml gets updated in the storage, C1 CMS Azure (the web role bits or the blob sync tool) will start down-syncing the website to the Azure web role/Windows Server based on the information you've specified in Websites.xml (where the website files should be taken from) as well as in WebsiteConfiguration.xml earlier (how the website should be configured and bindings set up).

If the down-syncing process haven't started automatically:

1. Create an empty file named LastSynchronized.txt.
2. Upload it to [website container]/Configuration.

Normally, C1 CMS Azure only down-syncs new and modified files, leaving out the unchanged ones and deleting the files in the web role no longer existing in the website container.

It will down-sync the same website to as many web roles as you've deployed.

If you are using the "staging / production websites" setup, you can go on to make your changes on the staging site and push them to the production websites on Microsoft Azure/Windows Server(s) with Azure Publisher.