Windows Azure Web Sites have a new support for web hooks, currently the only event that is directly being invoked is called PostDeployment and it will be invoked whenever a deployment is complete with the result of that deployment.
You can find more information on the API for this feature here.
Having this new API allowed us to collaborate with zapier.com and allow developers to get this post deployment information in many ways like: email, phone call or sms or even tweet about it.
zapier is a service that is all about the integration of other different services through the concept of triggers and actions.
A trigger could be a new github issue was opened or a new email was sent to your gmail account and an action could be tweeting a new tweet to tweeter or create a new note in your Evernote account.
In our case we've created a new trigger on Zapier for a deployment to a website that is complete and using Zapier you can connect this trigger to any of actions that are available.
More on Windows Azure Web Sites - Zapier Service
Let's see how:
A Microsoft Azure Web App that is deployed using source control (git, mercurial or dropbox).
Sign up to Zapier
Have both the Zapier and Azure portal open
Go to Zapier and create a new zap.
For the trigger service select Microsoft Azure Web Apps
For the trigger select New Website Deployment
For the action, we'll select email and send outbound email for this sample but any can be selected
Click Continue
We need to connect to our Azure Web App, for this we need one piece of information from the Azure portal
In the Azure portal go to your website, click on the CONFIGURE tab and under the git section copy the url which is under the DEPLOYMENT TRIGGER URL
Go back to the Zapier site and paste this url to the Deployment URL textbox, enter a name for this website account and click continue.
Since the email action doesn't require any special account, just click continue again.
At this point you can filter what kind of post deployment event will actually trigger this action (for example only failed deployments), for now we keep this empty, click continue
Create your Outbound Email lets you customize the email, the content can be static and dynamic (coming from the post deployment result)
On the To textbox enter your email
On the Subject textbox enter: Deployment complete with status: {{status}}
On the right side of each textbox there is an icon you can click to get the different dynamic fields that will be available from the deployment result, so in the Body textbox just experiment with the different fields.
Continue
Try out your Zap lets you test your zap by getting previous deployment results and doing the selected action on them, you can use it if you have existing deployments on your site otherwise click skip this.
Name your zap and make it live.
Last step is to deploy your site and see the magic (action) happens.
Get more help about Windows Azure Web Sites on Zapier.