Debugging Azure web-role startup tasks

One feature Azure offers for getting your  boxes configured is the notion of startup tasks – I won’t go into too much detail here as there is lots available online e.g. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/hh180155.aspx

As part of setting these up I thought I’d share a few tips / gotchas that caught me out when running powershell from the cmd tasks.

My solution setup was:

  • Site root
    • StartupScripts
      • Script.cmd
      • Script.ps1

So then I’d reference in the task:

 <Task commandLine=”StartupScripts\script.cmd” executionContext=”elevated” taskType=”simple” />

Nothing rocket science so far! So, why didn’t the script work? I could jump on the box and run the cmd and it would be fine.

How to debug the process?
I found the most useful way was to add markers from the cmd and the ps1. The cmd file looked like:

Note, the .\startupScripts part of the ps1 path is v important!

Then the powershell:

Note, if you try to write to log.txt you will get process locked exceptions as the cmd holds locks on the file.
There are all sorts of techniques for writing to a file, this example uses a StreamWriter. Hit up google for different examples.

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