A quick tip for all you new enthusiastic users of the amazing new Azure. I struggled for a few minutes finding this, so I thought I’d share. The Azure dashboard doesn’t seem to give easy access to your FTP credentials, and they are not the login and password you use everywhere else. What Azure does give you though is a Publish Profile that you can download:

This is a plain XML file that should look something like this:

<publishData>
  <publishProfile
    profileName="nameofyoursite - Web Deploy"
    publishMethod="MSDeploy"
    publishUrl="waws-prod-blu-001.publish.azurewebsites.windows.net:443"
    msdeploySite="nameofyoursite"
    userName="$NameOfYourSite"
    userPWD="sOmeCrYPTicL00kIngStr1nG"
    destinationAppUrl="http://nameofyoursite.azurewebsites.net"
    SQLServerDBConnectionString=""
    mySQLDBConnectionString=""
    hostingProviderForumLink=""
    controlPanelLink="http://windows.azure.com">
    <databases/>
  </publishProfile>
  <publishProfile
    profileName="nameofyoursite - FTP"
    publishMethod="FTP"
    publishUrl="ftp://waws-prod-blu-001.ftp.azurewebsites.windows.net/site/wwwroot"
    ftpPassiveMode="True"
    userName="nameofyoursite\$nameofyoursite"
    userPWD="sOmeCrYPTicL00kIngStr1nG"
    destinationAppUrl="http://nameofyoursite.azurewebsites.net"
    SQLServerDBConnectionString=""
    mySQLDBConnectionString=""
    hostingProviderForumLink=""
    controlPanelLink="http://windows.azure.com">
    <databases/>
  </publishProfile>
</publishData>

I’ve highlighted the FTP server name, user name and password. This is what you need to use in Filezilla or whatever you use to access your site remotely. Notice how the password looks encrypted. Well, it’s not really encrypted in fact. This is your password in clear text. It’s just crypto-random gibberish, which is the best kind of password.

UPDATE: About 2 minutes after I posted that, David Ebbo mentioned to me on Twitter that if you've configured publishing credentials (for Git typically) those will work too. Don't forget to include the full user name though, which should be of the form nameofthesite\username. The password is the one you defined.

That’s it. Enjoy.