How can I CHMOD files/directories on Windows Azure?

Question

I am using FileZilla FTP to right click and change a directories File Permissions as I do on many other sites/servers. For some reason this is not working in Windows Azure. It outputs in FileZilla "500 'SITE CHMOD 777 (mydirectory)': command not understood"

Any ideas?

Solution 1

I found a hack solution to delete files on Azure:

1. Stop your website from the management console (https://manage.windowsazure.com)
2. Open up the FTP site in Filezilla
3. Rename the directory that has the problem to anything else (Possibly an optional step, I dont know)
4. Delete the renamed directory
5. Restart your website.

That seems to do it.

Solution 2

The Windows Azure portal has a "Console" for websites where you can execute some shell commands. One of them appears to be chmod (fileutils) 4.1. I was able to modify the permissions on a folder using this:

chmod -R 744 myfolder

Solution 3

Windows Azure Websites is a Windows Server based server. Thus, file permissions don't work like in Linux (as @SLaks already mentioned).

However, the account your scripts (PHP/ASP.NET/node.js) are executed under has full access to the folder /site/wwwroot, as does your FTP user. Meaning that from your PHP you can do all fully privileged file access operations - Read, Write, Delete, Create, Create directories. What you cannot do, and cannot be changed, is to execute scripts (which 0777 would give you in Linux).