Useful Error Messages for Node.js Apps on Windows Azure Web Sites

I deployed a simple node.js app to Windows Azure Web Sites today and noticed something new (or at least that I haven’t payed attention to before). If there is an error starting your Node.js app the last 64k of the output generated by the node.exe process to stderr is shown on the error page. This makes discovering little things like forgetting to add a module to the package.json file much easier. You can see my error below.