Gotchas getting Next.js to run in Azure App Services

Posted on 2019-01-09 Updated on 2019-01-10

I’ve recently been getting to grips with Next.js which is awesome. However, we’re a bit unusual in that we’re trying to get the resulting application to run in Microsoft Azure. Since Azure is perfectly capable of getting node applications to run under IIS using the module iisnode I thought this would be a piece of cake.

Not so.

First of all, I had a perfectly working Next.js app that was running fine on my machine, but would fail when uploaded to Azure’s app service. That’s not that unusual, but what was extremely unhelpful is that there was no error message. All that was written to the error output was:

(node:22980) [DEP0005] DeprecationWarning: Buffer() is deprecated due to security and usability issues. Please use the Buffer.alloc(), Buffer.allocUnsafe(), or Buffer.from() methods instead.

This doesn’t seem like it’s really the issue but, if it’s not, then that leaves us with nothing to go on. After a fair amount of changing settings, adding logging and, frankly, throwing spaghetti at the wall, I decided it was time to reproduce the error locally. I installed iisnode on my machine (which turned out to be a doddle) and then got my site running… or not running.

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