I have recently started using an Umbraco Cloud Starter instance in the hopes of it solving some maintainability issues I had with previous manual installs.

I have followed the 'Getting started' documentation and all seems well. The integration with git is very nice and painless, as well as the fact that Umbraco Cloud allows you to have a local development site while allowing seamless transfer of content back and forth.

However, there are some issues:

Most sites I create rely rather heavily on the Articulate package (which is very nice btw).

Recently, I encountered some minor issues with that package (not the main point of discussion here) and to save some time, I developed my own patched version of the package binary, awaiting ultimate fixes in the 'official' release.

This is were problems start:

1. I installed the package on the local copy
2. I see changes in the MySite.Web repository (everything set up according to this guide but only in App_Plugins, nothing in bin
3. I commit and push and after also transferring some content nodes to the live site, everything seems OK.

But now I am wondering: I would have expected that the package binaries (the .dll) would also be pushed up into the cloud but this seems not to be the case.

Perhaps package installed are being handled differently, with a local install being mimicked directly in the cloud?

However, what means would I then have to create a patched .dll for any given package, particularly when wanting to deal quickly with e.g. compatibility issues between newer version of Umbraco and older packages (that might not be maintained by their creators)?

Also, if the .Web repository does not keep track of bin folder binaries, how then can custom dll's be added to the cloud site?

I must be missing something...

Update

I also found that, when creating a new local copy of my cloud site using UaaS.cmd, the binaries for any installed packages are missing from the local copy bin folder... bizarre.

Even so, the local copy indicates the packages should be installed and App_Plugins indeed contains all other relevant files.

Update

Using the Kudu console for my live instance I can now see that the binaries for packages that were installed on the local copy are also missing in the bin folder online.

Indeed, when I run git status --ignored, I get following output:

Interestingly, all external package binaries are ignored but also the .Core project output.

This seems to somewhat contradict the best practices advice by Sebastiaan and in the Umbraco docs itself.

However, I fail to see where this ignore is coming from...

Manually adding these binaries is easy enough but I found this confusing and perhaps this should be mentioned in the various documentations/tutorials?

Final Update

After manually adding the .dll to git and pushing everything to Umbraco cloud, all was well again. This obviously also addresses my original issue as I now have a means to modify package binaries if I so please.

Nonetheless, it would still be nice if this were to be documented somehow.