Windows Azure Websites is overriding my 404 and 500 error pages in my node.js app

Question

I am using Windows Azure Websites to host a node.js application. So far everything is great except for my custom errors. In my node app I have an error handler that renders a custom 404 and custom 500 error page just fine on my local machine. However, as soon as I publish to azure it overrides the response when I set the statusCode to anything except 200.

If I don't pass the 500 or 404 statusCode to the response then this does not happen, but I do want the status codes to make it to the browser. Locally I get my custom error page just fine:

However, on azure websites it only returns a single line of text:

The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.

I tried creating my own web.config to override the default one with custom errors disabled but that didn't seem to have any effect. Here is my web.config:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <customErrors mode="off" />
    </system.web>
    <system.webServer>
        <handlers>
            <add name="iisnode" path="app.js" verb="*" modules="iisnode"/>
        </handlers>
        <rewrite>
            <rules>
                <rule name="StaticContent">
                    <action type="Rewrite" url="public{REQUEST_URI}"/>
                </rule>
                <rule name="DynamicContent">
                    <conditions>
                        <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="True"/>
                    </conditions>
                    <action type="Rewrite" url="app.js"/>
                </rule>
            </rules>
        </rewrite>
        <iisnode
            debuggingEnabled="true"
            devErrorsEnabled="true"
            debuggerPathSegment="debug"
            nodeProcessCommandLine="&quot;%programfiles(x86)%\nodejs\node.exe&quot;"
            logDirectory="..\..\LogFiles\nodejs"
            watchedFiles="*.js;iisnode.yml;node_modules\*;views\*.jade;views\*.ejb;routes\*.js" />
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

I'm not sure if iisnode (the extension for iis that routes requests to node.js) is responsible for overriding my error pages or if iis itself is responsible. Any suggestions?

Relieve

This did not work for me, and the reason ended up being I had a <staticContent> section in my web.config. Removing that fixed it for me: #22550079 – Rowenarowland

Thanks for the info @MattGreer. Had you added the <staticContent> element yourself or is that new in Azure Websites default web.config? If it's part of the default web.config then I'd like to update this answer to reflect your correction. – Relieve

I added it myself in order to have IIS serve SVGs (which it does not do by default) – Rowenarowland

Answer 1

Well nevermind, I found the issue. If anyone else is having the same problem simply add the following under <system.webServer> in web.config:

<httpErrors existingResponse="PassThrough" />

Relieve

Answer 2

Had a similar problem with MVC project hosted in windows azure. On local machine hosted under IIS was working fine but on live machine I was getting the following error "The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable."

Adding this to web config under system.webServer saved my day

My web.config looks like this

<system.web>
   ***
    <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="~/Error/PageNotFound">
      <error statusCode="404" redirect="~/Error/PageNotFound" />
      <error statusCode="500" redirect="~/Error/ServerError"/>
    </customErrors>
  </system.web>
***
<system.webServer>
    <httpErrors existingResponse="PassThrough" />
</system.webServer>

Haldane

where ~/Error/PageNotFound is located and is it html file ? – Runner

It is an action from ErrorController -> PageNotFound that returns a View. – Haldane