I heard about Umbraco during MIX11 and was recently reminded of it when I was doing my research on CMS for Azure. What I really like was the availability of an Azure accelerator that allows you to setup Umbraco on Azure easily.

Well, I’m not too sure if its just me, but the setup process wasn’t really smooth sailing, so I thought it will be helpful to share my experiences and hopefully it will help you guys who encounter similar road blocks.

I highly recommend you watch this video from MIX11 to preview the entire setup process. Go on, I’ll be waiting right here when you are done 😉

Welcome back, time to start cracking, download the following:

1. Umbraco Azure Accelerator
2. Umbraco on Codeplex

These are the steps that I took to setup Umbraco on Azure:

1. Create a storage account
2. Execute Setup.cmd in the root folder of your accelerator installation
3. Enter your storage account name
4. Copy and paste your storage account primary key
5. Create a new hosted service
6. Following the steps in the section “Deploy Accelerator to Windows Azure” in StartHere.html located at the root folder of your accelerator installation to deploy the accelerator to the new hosted services. (go make yourself a cup of coffee while waiting for the deployment to complete =P)
7. Create a new SQL Azure database server
8. Continue with the next few steps of Setup.Cmd to setup the SQL Azure database

Break!

This is where I encountered a problem. For some weird reason, I can’t seem to connect to my SQL Azure server at all from Setup.Cmd. So this is what I did instead

1. Go back to the Windows Azure Portal then click on the “Manage” button at the ribbon bar.
2. Create a new database with this sql statement “create database umbraco“
3. Copy the sql statements in the file [UmbracoAccelerator root folder]UmbracoAcceleratorsetupdbSqlAzure.CreateSchema.sql to the query window and hit “Execute”
4. Do the same for the next sql script at [UmbracoAccelerator root folder]UmbracoAcceleratorsetupdbSqlAzure.ImportCleanDatabase.sql
5. as well as for the sql script at [UmbracoAccelerator root folder]UmbracoAcceleratorsetupdbSqlAzure.InstallSqlState.sql

Now when you are done with this, the SQL Azure database has been successfully created. Hop back to Setup.Cmd. When you reach the step where it asked for this:

Type the Session State database name to create:

just enter the name of the database name that you have created in the previous step.

an error message will appear:

“Creating the SQL Azure database…

Database ‘”umbraco”‘ already exists. Please delete it and then press any key to

continue…”

hit enter to continue and follow the next few prompts accordingly. When you are presented with this question:

Do you wish to upload an existing Umbraco site to Blob Storage? [Y,N]?

Key in “Y”, entering “N” will exit the whole setup process.

At the next step, make sure that you enter a valid sub domain such aswww.helloumbraco.com

Once you hit enter, a GUI will appear to allow you to upload your Umbraco site to blob storage.

What wasn’t obvious was that you would have to map your domain from your domain registrar (I use GoDaddy) to the url of your Azure deployment. The accelerator will do site binding for the domain that you specify previously, in this case, “www.helloumbraco.com”.

Once you are done with that, navigating to ww.helloumbraco.com will fire up your umbraco site in your hosted service.

That’s all folks! Congratulations! Your umbraco site is now on the cloud!

I seriously think Umbraco is really a damm bloody cool .NET CMS. The only issue I face right now is the lack of documentation. Oh well, maybe I just need to bite the bullet and spend a little more time with it. Anyway hope this guide will be useful to those who encounter similar issues with setting up Umbraco on Azure.

Enjoy!

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