NodeRole is the way smarx deploys node apps to Windows Azure. Note that these days, there's (built-in support for running Node.js in Windows Azure)[http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/], which you may prefer to use.

The NodeRole uses iisnode and Windows native builds of node.exe.

The code works by downloading prerequisites (node, the iisnode module, and the C++ runtime required) at runtime, installing them in the VMs in Windows Azure, and then synchronizing code from either a git repository or a blob container. This way, changes can be made rapidly without having to redeploy. Dependencies are installed by running npm, the Node package manager.

To use it, do the following:

1. Create an app with a server.js in it. The app must listen on the port specified by the PORT environment variable (e.g. listen(process.env.PORT || 3000), which will default to port 3000 if simply being run from the command line).
2. Push that code to a public git repository or to a container within Windows Azure blob storage.
3. Build NodeRole (by running build from the command line).
4. Configure the application (by editing *.cscfg) with either a GitUrl (full URL to your git repository) or the pair of DataConnectionString and ContainerName. You can specify both a git URL and a blob container, and both will be sync'd to the same directory.
5. Run the app locally with the Windows Azure compute emulator with run from the command line, making sure that you've modified ServiceConfiguration.Local.cscfg, which is used when running locally.
6. Deploy the app to Windows Azure, using NodeRole.cspkg and ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg from noderole\bin\release\app.publish, with appropriate settings in the .cscfg file.

As an alternative to downloading and building yourself, you can click on "downloads" above and download a pre-built package and deploy that. (You can still modify *.cscfg to use your own app code.)

For example apps, take a look at twoenglishes and smarxchat, both of which are running in Windows Azure using this package.