Basic DevOps in Azure Websites (and Behind the scenes 👅)

Nirav Madariya — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 16:11:54 +0000

If you wanna implement CI/CD in your webapp in azure, you don’t need to be a “PRO”.

A feature Deployment center in Azure websites comes with all Azure Websites, formerly known as continuous delivery tab.

*Introduction * :

Deployment Center (Basic CI/CD) comes with several options to deploy from (Source control)and platform to be deployed by (Build Provider), described as follow.

Deployment options (Source control):

Azure Repos (from Azure DevOps)
Github 🐙
BitBucket
Local Git
OneDrive
DropBox
External (Public Git or Mercurial repo)
FTP

Deployment options (to be deployed by/Build Provider)

Kudu Services
Azure Pipelines (Preview)

I’ll be explaining Basic DevOps with Azure websites in just 4 steps. Let’s get started.

Step 1 : Go to “Deployment center” from settings pane left side

Deployment center in Azure websites

Setup the Source control from step 1,

Step 1 : select source control

Step 2 : Select build provider

Step 2 : Select Build provider

Step 3 : Configure Source Control

Step 3 : Configure source control

Step 4 : Confirm the selections you made :P

step 4 : Summary

That’s all. You are good to go.

From now on, what ever you commit on the GitHub repository you configured, it will be automatically be updated in the Azure website.

Behind the Scenes :

The Azure website you configured, that has Kudu services behind the scenes working. Which you can access at https://<your_app>.scm.azurewebsires.net, which uses your Azure login.

In your GitHub repository you just configured, that have a webhook configured to push into your Azure website Kudu service, see below.

Behind the scenes : WebHook

As soon as you commit and push some changes to the repository, it will trigger the url as https://<your-website>.scm.azurewebsites.net/deploy

Which in turn will get the latest changes from your repo and try to build the application.

Verify your Deployment :

From Overview of the application you’ll see the source control details, as below.

Verify Deployment settings — 1

Also, in Deployment center you’ll see the latest builds, Deployment details, it’s status (Succeeded or Failed), which build is active, and Logs for more information.

Verify Deployment settings — 2

That’s All.

Disclaimer :

This type of Auto Deployment is just for Dev/Test purpose, this is not recommended for your production workloads.

Hope this article has walked you clear with the concepts of Basic DevOps(CI/CD) for Azure app services. In case you want to connect with me you can DM me in twitter at https://twitter.com/niravmadariya

Please don’t forget to clap for the article if you liked reading it. See you soon with more concepts in Azure :)

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Azure MySQL in App for App services

Nirav Madariya — Sat, 10 Nov 2018 18:59:42 +0000

When you need a database for your website, why purchase a separate database service?

MySQL in app in Azure app service

MySQL in app was announced in March, 2017. Azure provides MySQL within your web app (App service), every web app in Azure has MySQL in app as an option. For Windows hosting MySQL in app service is available.

Note that, this can be used for small projects or dev/test projects, when moving to production you might want to consider Azure database for MySQL, which is Enterprise-ready, fully managed community MySQL database.

Getting Started :

This option comes disabled by default in every app service you create. In order to have MySQL in app database, you need to enable it from your web app settings, as shown below :

Enabling MySQL in app for Azure app services

After enabling it, wait for couple of minutes to enable certain services for your web app, which includes some cool stuff such as phpmyadmin.

After enabling it, you’ll see the screen as below :

MySQL in App Settings

To secure the connection between your app and your MySQL Database, you have an environment variable named “MYSQLCONNSTR_localdb” which contains value as connection string for your in app MySQL database.

Now, access your phpmyadmin go to : https://.scm.azurewebsites.net/phpmyadmin. You have phpmyadmin now, which means you can start using MySQL database.

You can connect to in app MySQL as below :

<?php 
    //below will give the whole connectionstring in a single string
    $conn = getenv("MYSQLCONNSTR\_localdb"); 

    //Let's split it and decorate it in an array
    $conarr2 = explode(";",$conn); 
    $conarr = array();
    foreach($conarr2 as $key=>$value){
        $k = substr($value,0,strpos($value,'='));
        $conarr[$k] = substr($value,strpos($value,'=')+1);
    }
    // $conarr is an array of values of connection string
    print\_r($conarr); 
?>

There you go, you have now connection details to MySQL in app available within your app service, now you can use mysqli_* functions or PDO to perform CRUD operations and much more.

Hope this article has walked you clear with the concepts of MySQL in app for Azure app services. In case you want to connect with me you can DM me in twitter at https://twitter.com/niravmadariya