Question

I am still experimenting with Azure multi tenant development. I now have my first trial thingy, but in order to use subdomain names (customer.site.com) I need to switch my Azure website to shared/reserved. Since I am still experimenting, I rather not start paying for Azure. Is there a way around this? Or, is it possible to test the multi-tenant part in my local visual studio webserver?

Answer 1

No, you can’t have custom domain names with FREE websites.

But what you could do, is to switch the tenant recognition from sub-domain to a path. So instead of having tenant10.site.com/ you would have mysites.azurewebsites.net/tenant10/. That would basically be just a change in URL Rewrite rules – which I think is the right way to handle multi-tenancy recognition at URL level. And URL rewrite is supported in Azure WebSites as well Azure Cloud Services.

Testing the multi-tenancy locally is even easier. You just open your hosts file (in a typical windows installation it is located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Just add entries for all (sub)domains you want to test, and map them to 127.0.0.1. Something like:

127.0.0.1   tenant1.mydomain.com
127.0.0.1   tenant2.mydomain.com
127.0.0.1   tenant15.mydomain.com
...

Then, run your project with F5 like you would normally do and manually type in the new address in browser’s address bar: tenant1.mydomain.com.

However first launch the project with F5 to check the real IP address of local development fabric, because sometimes it may not be 127.0.0.1, but 127.0.0.8 or something else. The IP address that is used in your browser’s initial launch is the IP Address you have to fill in your hosts file.

However, if you work with real (sub)domain names in hosts file, do never forget to remove the entries from it, as you will never reach the real Internet sites.