Azure-hosted web sites and unknown mime types

My kids had some projects they wanted to publish to the web for their elementary school coding club. One was using a tutorial project in Unity, and the other was an RPGMaker project. Both projects built just fine, and would run locally in a browser, but as soon as I hosted them up into an Azure website, neither of them worked properly.

Both Unity and RPGMaker projects were stuck at the ‘loading’ screen.

Looking at the browser console, I could see both project types were getting errors trying to access static .json files. Hmmmm….after a quick search, I noticed lots of existing documentation on the fact that Azure does not play well with unknown MIME types.

Solution: Add custom mime types via web.config – and everything works great.

Note: I had to add a second mime type for .m4a files in order to get the RPGMaker sound files to be served up by Azure.

<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <staticContent>
            <mimeMap fileExtension=".json" mimeType="application/json" />
            <mimeMap fileExtension=".m4a" mimeType="audio/mp4" />
     </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

 

New Beginnings. Again.

I’ve been using GoDaddy for domain registration and Windows web hosting for years. My hosting subscription with them is coming due (multi-year agreement), and now it’s time to move all my hosting into Azure. I have a blog (untouched since 2013), a couple websites, and a few web services to support a few mobile apps I developed for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

Most of that stuff (including the mobile apps) has also been untouched for years, and I think I’m just going to shut everything down instead of trying to move it all over. I am re-creating a new blog (this) though, and I’ll consider moving any posts I’d like to keep over here. Everything else is probably just going to get archived.

So now I have to go do a bunch of cleanup, figure out the logins into the various App Stores and remove all my existing apps since I’m dumping all the supporting services etc. It was a good run, but it’s time to start fresh!