A common problem you might encounter in Windows Azure is seeing a big old “The page cannot be displayed” page due to an error occurring in your azure-deployed node app.

If you haven’t seen it, it looks exactly like this:

The reason this is happening is because by default we don’t allow errors to propagate back to the user. This is in order to prevent you publishing to production and leaking details of your system.

Let’s assume I just published a simple express app, but I made an error. Below you can see that instead of requiring winston, I required win$ton.

When I publish, I’ll see the page cannot be displayed error.

iisnode.yml to the rescue

To find out what is going on, you can enable displaying errors using our YAML configuration file otherwise known as iisnode.yml. If you use our azure-cli tool, and create a site in a directory where there is a node app, then we automatically create it for you. If not, you can create one really easy with any text editor. The entries you need to put in the file / update are below.

Once you save that file, go republish to Windows Azure. If the file did not exist and this is an Azure Website, do an “azure site restart”. if the file already existed, you won’t need to do anything.

Now with debugger errors enabled I see the following:

Bingo!

Don’t go to production this way, but DO use tail for websites.

Make sure to disable debugger errors when you go to production. You can leave logging enabled however, because another command you can still use is “azure site log tail” which will stream logs directly to your console realtime. Also if you are a cloud service, you can remote in to view the logs written locally.

Using “azure site log tail” watch what happens when I refresh the page.

azure-log tail has many more uses. You can use it to capture any log output that your applications give you in a realtime manner. For example here’s a screenshot of me tailing an app using socket.io and Service Bus in Azure.

Yes it is awesome!

PS: Today “tail” works only for node apps, but that is going to change VERY shortly.