Installing third-party Drupal modules on Azure

Question

I've just started playing around with the new "Website" feature in Azure that allows you to create websites with just one step - and also allows you to create websites from a "Gallery", including Drupal. And I can get my Drupal site up and running, no problem. But if I try to add a third-party module (for instance, Mindtree's ODataDrupal ), then I get this error message:

Installation failed! See the log below for more information.

odata_support

Error installing / updating

File Transfer failed, reason: Cannot chmod /DWASFiles/Sites/theparentsunion/VirtualDirectory0/site/wwwroot/sites/all/modules/odata_support.

More-or-less the same thing happens if I try to update some of the existing modules (which Drupal warns, with big red flashing letters, are out of date), except then my Drupal install is left crippled, with no way to fix it that I've been able to find.

Is this as-designed, or some limitation of the beta website integration? (Because a Drupal installation is kinda worthless if you can't add new modules to it, or update existing ones.) Or am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

If you are trying to use plugins and 3rd party modules to Drupal based Windows Azure Websites, the results may vary person to person. This is mainly because the kind of configuration needed by specific module or plugin may or may not be supported by Windows Azure Websites model and not all kind of custom configuration will work on Windows Azure Websites and you would need to move to Windows Azure Virtual Machines.

About application specific structure, what you can do is open the websites FTP folder and whatever you could see there is user configurable, so you can configure it the way you want. However if you application will try to make changes to outside its limited scope, you will hit errors as above.

Here is a case study where Azure VM was used for Drupal based migration which shows that for complex application you may need to use AZure VM rather then Azure Websites.