As packaging a cloud based solution one of the tasks is to change the configuration of the services so that they have a application specific domain. In the case of Azure websites this feature has been available for quite a while in the form of custom domains. However, it was only recently that this capability was added to Azure Mobile Services. This enables me to change the Mobile Service url from https://realestateinspector.azure-mobile.net to https://realestate.builttoroam.com. This capability is only available to Mobile Services running in Standard mode, which can be quite a costly commitment if custom domains are the only reason to upgrade.
Here’s a quick run through of setting up a custom domain. Note that this doesn’t include setting up SSL for your custom domain, which is highly recommended. There is more information here that includes using wildcard SSL certificates, which might be useful if you are packaging multiple services (eg Mobile Service and a Website) off the same base domain.
The first thing to do is to setup a CName record (alternatively you can setup an A record using these instructions) – this needs to be done with the name service that hosts the DNS records for your domain.
If you simply try to browse to the new URL you’ll see quite a useful 404 message. The first option is exactly the scenario I now face – I have to configure the Mobile Service to know about the custom domain.
Currently there is no UI in the Azure portal for managing custom domains for Mobile Services, unlike for Azure Websites where it can all be configured in the portal. Instead, I need to use the Azure CLI. Before doing this, make sure you are using v0.8.15 or higher (v0.8.15 is current at time of writing). Note that I ran into some issues upgrading the Azure CLI – docs online suggest using npm (eg npm update azure-cli, or npm update azure-cli –g depending on whether you installed the azure-cli globally or not). However, I found that this wasn’t working – the output suggested it had updated to 0.8.15 but when I queried azure –v I saw an earlier version. Turns out that I’d installed the azure-cli via the Web Platform Installer – in this case you either need to uninstall the azure-cli via the platform installer, or simply install the new version via the platform installer (which is what I did).
Adding a custom domain is then relatively straight forward: azure mobile domain add <mobileservicename> <customdomain> eg
Now when you browse to the new url you see the typical Mobile Service status homepage.
When I run my client applications I need to update the Mobile Service Client URL to point to the new url. I can then see in Fiddler that the traffic is indeed going to the new custom domain.
