Synchronizing Files With Azure Web Apps Over FTP
I've recently been experimenting with Azure for static site hosting. While there are lots of great static site hosts (my personal favorite still remains Netlify), Azure Web Apps offer some attractive features to enterprises or organizations already invested in Azure. One would think that easily deploying a static site to Azure would be relatively straightforward. Unfortunately, I found that this wasn't the case at all. While Azure Web Apps have some advanced deployment options like Kudu for git deployments and Web Deploy for deployments from Visual Studio, both require some setup and configuration, are designed with "application" scenarios in mind, and aren't as straightforward as a simple FTP upload. Unfortunately, even FTP uploads to Azure Web Apps have some issues that I'll discuss below. To address this scenario, I ended up writing a little bit of code to automatically synchronize a local static site with an Azure Web App FTP server that ignores unchanged files.