After Azure Search was released as public preview I wrote a post introducing the RedDog.Search client and the management portal. The portal is a great resource to help you manage your Search Service, but during the last week I did get some negative feedback from a few people:
- No support for authentication (so deploying to Azure Web Sites is not an option)
- Hosting this on-premises = going back to the stone age
- Developers that don’t use Visual Studio can’t build the portal so it’s useless
- …
So I had a chat with David Ebbo who helped me turn the portal into a Site Extension for Azure Web Sites, which has some cool advantages:
- The portal is hosted under the scm site of your Web Site, which is protected by Azure Active Directory
- The portal is hosted within the context of your Web Site, so it can reuse the same configuration settings
- No need to build or deploy the portal. Just install the extension and you’re good to go. Which means, if you’re a PHP, Django, Java, Node.js, … developer without Visual Studio you can also use the portal
Installing the Site Extension
Just follow these simple steps to install the Site Extension:
- Add 2 app settings under the Configure tab of your Web Site (Azure.Search.ServiceName and Azure.Search.ApiKey)
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- Go to your scm site (for example: http://phpsiteusingsearch.scm.azurewebsites.net/) and navigate to the Site Extensions tab.
- Install the extension: RedDog Search Portal
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Clik here to view. - After the extension is installed click the Restart site button and then click the play button in the extension (this will open the extension).
- You’re good to go. You can now manage your indexes, test a few queries or upload a CSV file containing your data
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New Portal
And for those of you that are using the new portal you can also install the Site Extension from within the new portal:
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Enjoy!
