In the previous section, you learned how to choose a proper operating system for your application. This is, of course, not everything needed to run a website—you have to also enable a specific language if you want to deploy, for example, PHP code. To do so, go to your App Service (you have many options by which to do this: either choose App Services from the Azure Portal menu on the left and select your Web App, or go to the resource group you created by choosing it from Resource Groups blade) and then select the Application settings blade:
Initially, you could feel a bit overwhelmed by all those options available, but soon, as you gain more and more experience, all will become clear. You might have noticed the Upgrade to enable links here—some features, such as Platform or Always On, are only available from the B1 tier upward.
Remember that the Always On feature could become crucial in some specific scenarios, as it defines whether your application is always running or not (so it can become idle when no one uses it). As you will learn in the coming sections, setting Always On to On is required when running, for example, continuous Web Jobs or Azure Functions.
Currently, we are interested in all options mentioning a programming language. These options include the following:
- .NET Framework version
- PHP version
- Python version
- Java version
By default, your App Service supports two languages: .NET Framework version and PHP version. To run, for instance, Python or Java, you would have to set an appropriate setting to a specific version such as enable Java support using Java version dropdown.
As mentioned earlier, always select the correct operating system powering your App Service, depending on the language that you chose for your application. While it is possible to run PHP or Python on Windows, selecting Linux, is recommended, could be recommended, as many libraries and packages can run only under this particular operating system.
