Migrating a DNN (Dotnetnuke) website to the Cloud part 4
With testing complete, it is now time to make your DNN Portal in Azure live. This involves changing the records in the external DNS zones for all the domain names that will be used with your DNN portal.
As this will likely cause service interruption, this is the kind of work that needs to be done within an arranged period of downtime. The task itself, however, is a straightforward one.
You will, of course, need the public facing IP address for your web application. This can be found in the Azure portal under App Services – your app service name – Settings – Custom Domains. You will also need the name of your web application. This will be in the format xxxxxx.azurewebsites.net where xxxxxx represents the name of your Azure App Service.
The interface used to change your DNS records will vary depending on your provider but the records that needs to be added or changed remain the same.
Records to be added
A record of type TXT with a TTL of 3600 seconds (1 hour) needs to be added for each domain that you will be using to identify it to Azure.
- @ TXT xxxxxx.azurewebsites.net 3600
- * TXT xxxxxx.azurewebsites.net 3600
Where xxxxxx represents the name of our Azure App Service
DNS Records to be changed
The IP address for your website needs to be changed to use the IP address of your Azure App Service so the address records.
Where aa.bb.cc.dd is the IP address of your Azure App Service
In addition, it I usually necessary to change the domain IP address so that xxxxxx.com will resolve to the same IP address as www.xxxxxx.com. Again use a TTL of 3600 seconds (1 hour)
- @ A aa.bb.cc.dd 3600
- * A aa.bb.cc.dd 3600
where aa.bb.cc.dd is the IP address of your Azure App Service
Now, you will have to wait for the DNS changes to propagate. After an hour, you should be able to test whether the change has replicating using any of the remote ping services available on the Internet thing such Wormly. Note that Azure itself does not respond to ping requests but you will be able to see if your domain name resolves to the new IP address.