Area routes not working in ASP.NET Core MVC when deploying on Azure

Question

When running the app locally, all routing works fine. But when publishing to Azure, only the non-Area controllers work (such as "Home" and "Account"), the area-routes return 404.

Startup.cs has the following:

routes.MapRoute("areaRoute", "{area:exists}/{controller}/{action=Index}/{id?}");

project.json has dependencies (amongst others):

"Microsoft.NETCore.App": {
      "version": "1.0.0",
      "type": "platform"
    }

and frameworks:

"netcoreapp1.0": {
      "imports": [
        "dotnet5.6",
        "portable-net45+win8"
      ]
    }

and publishOptions:

"include": [
      "wwwroot",
      "Views",
      "Areas/**/Views",
      "appsettings.json",
      "web.config"
    ]

Answer 1

There's an issue with the globbing pattern that is being tracked via https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/3795. Listing individual areas in the publish/include section could be used as a workaround. For instance,

"include": [
  "wwwroot",
  "Views",
  "Areas/Area1/Views",
  "Areas/Area2/Views",
  "appsettings.json",
  "web.config"
]

Answer 2

The problem was fixed for me by checking all ".cshtml" files have "Build Action: Content" set in the properties window. For some reason, my Index.cshtml was set to "Build Action: None".