Azure Static Web Apps with React and Visual Studio Code

#azure #react #visualstudiocode #staticwebapps

Hey everyone, in today's post we are talking about how deploy an React Application to Azure Static Web App using Visual Studio Code.

To understand what is Azure Static Web App, visit Azure Static Web Apps - The Big Picture

Prerequisites

NPM
Visual Studio Code
Azure Static Web App extension for Visual Studio Code
Git

Installing React Framework

Once all the prerequisites are installed on your machine, the next step is to install React, for that run the command below.

npm install -g create-react-app

Creating a ReactJS project

Now that you have React installed, you can create a new react project directory by running the command below

npx create-react-app <project-name>

After creating the project, let's open it in Visual Studio Code. You can open the project using the interface or by typing the command below in your command line tool.

code .

Important: Always access the project root before opening in Visual Studio Code or you can open VS Code first and then open the project root. Always avoid opening the folder of the project you created in the previous folder, as this can lead to errors in the build and consequently in the pipeline.

The next step is the deployment, so Press F1 and search for Azure Static Web App: Create Static Web Apps and select.

In the next step, we need to select the Azure Subscription, but if you are not logged into your Azure account with Visual Studio Code, an option to make the connection will be displayed.

In the next option, we need to define the name to be given to the service in Azure.

In the next step, it's time to define a name for the GitHub repository

The next step is to define the region where the resource will be created.

Now it's time to define the project type. Note that Azure Static Web Apps supports multiple frameworks and since our project is a React project, we should select the React option.

Here we need to set the path to the root of the React project. By doing this, the executor responsible for deploying the code will be able to run the npm run build command to generate the outputs in the build directory. Let's set / to this option.

In the last step, we need to define the application build output path and for React projects we need to inform the build folder that it's generate by build command.

Finally, press enter to start creating the resource on Azure and creating the repository on GitHub.

Once the run is complete, we have an instance of Azure Static Web Apps provisioned in Azure and ready to use, and the repository on GitHub with our code. At the end, the code deployment pipeline will be executed automatically by GitHub Actions.