Umbraco 15.4.1 App not running on Azure App Service despite successful deployment

Questions
1

Title:
Umbraco 15.4.1 App not running on Azure App Service despite successful deployment

Description:
We are currently trying to deploy our new website built with Umbraco to an Azure App Service. After several days of debugging, we have not been able to identify the issue.

As a test, I created a brand-new Umbraco application using the official template (NuGet version 15.4.1) and deployed it to Azure App Service, following all documented steps (environment variables, folders, etc.).

The deployment completes successfully, but the application does not start. When accessing the App Service via the App Service Editor and trying to run it manually, I noticed the app was missing the wwwroot/media folder — even though this folder is not part of the default solution. After manually creating the folder, no exception was thrown, but the application still does not work (it does not respond and does not show any error. Just Error 500 when calling the page).

What I’ve tried so far:

  • Followed all official documentation for deploying Umbraco to Azure.
  • Verified environment variables (e.g. DOTNET_ENVIRONMENT, WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE, etc.).
  • Created missing wwwroot/media directory manually.
  • Checked logs and console output — no clear error message appears.

Question:
Has anyone else experienced similar behavior with Umbraco 15.4.1 on Azure App Service? Any known workarounds or missing steps?

Thanks in advance for any help or ideas!

2

What does the Umbraco logs say? Are you running a Linux or Windows web app? What database are you using?

3

Umbraco Logs only indicate the missing folder. After that, there were no errors

I am running on a windows web app.

Azure SQL-Database

4

Are you running on the correct .NET version? In this case .NET 9? I’m just guessing now, but that can cause weird issues without proper logging or error messages.

5

image
image556×154 20.7 KB

The image shows "Stack settings" with dropdown menus for selecting a ".NET" stack and ".NET 9 (STS)" version. (Captioned by AI)
The image shows "Stack settings" with dropdown menus for selecting a ".NET" stack and ".NET 9 (STS)" version. (Captioned by AI)766×208 7.07 KB

Yes. Both are on .NET 9

6

Are you checking the actual log files in Umbraco/data/logs? I noticed that in some cases that errors don’t show up in Application Insights for instance when Umbraco failed to boot.

7

Yeah. I noticed that as well. Thats why i entered the app service editor and looked into the Umbraco/data/logs. There i then found the Exception with the missing folder.

8

Hmm does the log stream of the webapp say anything? We’ve had issues where the boot times was too long for the default boot timeout and you can only see that in the log stream.

9

In the end, the deployment succeeded after setting the ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT to Production and specifying the UmbracoURL under the WebHosting section in the appsettings.json.

2 Likes
10

I also experienced the same issue as above. A clean v15 site cannot be deployed on Azure Web Apps using publish unless ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT and UmbracoURL are set, and the /media folder is present.

Thank you for posting the solution. I’ve included our Azure App Configuration setup, if it’s helpful for someone else.

[
  {
    "name": "ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT",
    "value": "Production",
    "slotSetting": false
  },
  {
    "name": "UMBRACO__CMS__WebRouting__UmbracoApplicationUrl",
    "value": "https://<WEBSITE>.azurewebsites.net/",
    "slotSetting": false
  },
  {
    "name": "UMBRACO__CMS__Examine__LuceneDirectoryFactory",
    "value": "SyncedTempFileSystemDirectoryFactory",
    "slotSetting": false
  },
  {
    "name": "UMBRACO__CMS__Global__MainDomLock",
    "value": "FileSystemMainDomLock",
    "slotSetting": false
  },
  {
    "name": "UMBRACO__CMS__Hosting__LocalTempStorageLocation",
    "value": "EnvironmentTemp",
    "slotSetting": false
  }
]