Azure Web App - adding basic auth through applicationHost.xdt? - iis-7

Question

I have an Azure Web App with basic authentication configured for non-PROD environments inside web.config, like below:
<configSections>
<section name="basicAuth" type="Devbridge.BasicAuthentication.Configuration.BasicAuthenticationConfigurationSection" />
</configSections>
<basicAuth allowRedirects="true">
<credentials>
<add username="username" password="password"/>
</credentials>
</basicAuth>
<system.webServer>
<modules>
<add name="MyBasicAuthenticationModule" type="Devbridge.BasicAuthentication.BasicAuthenticationModule"/>
</modules>
<!-- the rest of the web.config follows -->
Everything works fine, but whenever we do a PROD deployment with changes to web.config, a manual change to the file is required to disable basic auth (as mentioned, we need it on non-prod only).
So I wonder - is there a way to enable basic authentication with applicationHost.xdt file? Since this is a file that is not changed very often, it would make our life easier.
I already checked the IIS Manager extension, but don't see anything that would allow me to make this work. Any hints are appreciated!
UPDATES - adding my web.config (that I'd like to update with applicationHost.xdt)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Redirect to HTTPS" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="(.*)"/>
<conditions>
<add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="^OFF$"/>
</conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}" redirectType="Permanent"/>
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>

Answer 1

According to your description, I assumed that you are using DevBridge Azure Power Tools which supports basic authentication for Windows Azure websites. I followed this project Devbridge.BasicAuthentication.Test to test XDT Transform on my side. I could make it work on my side, you could refer to it.
1.Create a Release-dev configuration
Click "Build > Configuration Manager", add a new configuration for the web project.
2.Add a web configuration file named Web.Release-dev.config and configuration the content as follows:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">
<!--make sure the configSections is the first child element under configuration-->
<configSections xdt:Transform="InsertBefore(/configuration/*[1])" />
<configSections xdt:Locator="XPath(/configuration/configSections[last()])">
<section name="basicAuth" type="Devbridge.BasicAuthentication.Configuration.BasicAuthenticationConfigurationSection" xdt:Transform="InsertIfMissing" xdt:Locator="Match(name)"/>
</configSections>
<configSections xdt:Transform="RemoveAll" xdt:Locator="Condition(count(*)=0)" />
<basicAuth allowRedirects="true" xdt:Transform="InsertAfter(/configuration/configSections)">
<credentials xdt:Transform="InsertIfMissing">
<add username="test" password="test" xdt:Transform="InsertIfMissing"/>
</credentials>
</basicAuth>
<system.webServer xdt:Transform="InsertIfMissing">
<modules xdt:Transform="InsertIfMissing">
<add name="MyBasicAuthenticationModule" type="Devbridge.BasicAuthentication.BasicAuthenticationModule" xdt:Transform="InsertIfMissing" xdt:Locator="Match(name)"/>
</modules>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>
Note: You could refer to Xdt transform samples. Also, you could follow this official document about the syntax of xdt:Transform and xdt:Locator attributes that you use in your Web.config transform files.
3.Publish the web project by using the release-dev configuration:
4.Check the deployed web.config file via KUDU:
Browser the site, you could see the following screenshot:
UPDATE
For a workaround, I assumed that you could exclude web.config file from your git repository. And add the web.config file under "D:\home\site\wwwroot" and Devbridge.BasicAuthentication.dll under "D:\home\site\wwwroot\bin" for your DEV and QA environment to enable basic auth as follows: