A new Swiss Army Knife
As a backend developer I use a lot of different tools in the course of my daily work. Apart from the IDE and git, I need a universal REST client to fire requests at my server code under development…
Microsofts Azure DevOps is a great online CI/CD tool for developers and teams. Some of its most important features are:
Some of these features are nicely integrated into Visual Studio as well, off course.
In this step-by-step walk-through I’ll show you how you can bring your web application to the Azure cloud in a couple of simple steps, using Visual Studio and Azure DevOps. I will not be covering Azure topics like resource groups, subscriptions and service plans, so if you’re not familiar with those parts, head over to portal.azure.com and have a look around or ask Google to help you out.
This first step is all about setting up an app service in Azure that will host your website.
Browse to https://portal.azure.com/ and login using your Microsoft account. Then follow these steps:
Click the button Review and Create at the bottom and then again hit the button Create. Azure will now start to create and deploy your new app service.
Once Azure is done, it will notify you of the deployment and you can browse to the new resource.
Open the URL of your created app service (https://reinder.azurewebsites.net in my example) and check that it actually works:
This is the part where we are going to create a GIT repository within Azure DevOps and upload our web application code to the cloud.
Browse to https://dev.azure.com/ and login using your Microsoft account. DevOps will load your personal space, then follow these steps:
Once your project has been created, click Repos in the menu on the left side and then click the button Clone in Visual Studio:
A Visual Studio instance should be opened (if asked to log in, use the same account as you use for DevOps), and you will be asked to specify where to place the repository on your local machine:
In Visual Studio, open your Team Explorer. There is a small link there to create a new project or solution directly in this repository. Click it and create an ASP.NET Core Web Application, with MVC.
Let Visual Studio do all its magic, grab a coffee, have a break and once it is done, hit F5 to check if your new application actually works locally.
Alternatively, you can off course add an existing .NET solution to your GIT repo as well.
If you’re happy with your app, go to Changes in Team Explorer, enter a commit message and commit all your new files to the repo. Then, go to Sync and hit Push. Your files in the master branch are now being uploaded to DevOps.
You can check this by going into DevOps and choosing Repos > Branches in the main menu; you will see all your master branch with all the added files located in that section and you can just browse through them.
No problem! Azure DevOps lets you build lots of other type of applications as well: ASP.NET, JAVA, Node.js, Android, etc. You could also just add an empty template as a build step and configure a PowerShell script, command line tool, Grunt task, Docker, Maven, Jenkins, XCode, you name it.
Now that we have all our code in place, it’s time to get our deployment pipelines up & running.
In DevOps, head over to Pipelines. Hit the blue button Create Pipeline and follow the steps to setup a new pipeline. In our case, we need to choose ‘Azure Repos Git’, then choose our newly created project and finally choose ‘ASP.NET Core (.NET Framework)’.
The wizard will create a YAML file for you, and place it directly in the root of the corresponding GIT repo.
This default template will only build our application, but we also want the pipeline to package the site into a zip file so we can publish it to Azure. For this to happen, we need to add another task to the YAML.
In the Tasks pane on the right, search for ‘publish build artifact’ and then choose the ‘Publish build artifacts’ task. This will add the necessary task code to our YAML markup.
All done, now we hit the blue button Save and run at the top right.
DevOps will now start this pipeline to build your project; you will see that a Job is now running and if you click on it, you can follow the progress of the build:
If all goes well, you should end up with all green checkmarks.
If anything happens during your build that’s serious enough to make it fail, you can check the logs of that build to figure out what happened.
If you navigate to a broken build, you will see all the different steps on the left and can click on the one that has a red cross in front. This will open the log for that particular step and you can scroll through it to find the error messages in bold red so you can investigate what went wrong. Sometimes these errors will be easy to fix, like a failing unit test or a missing file but sometimes they can be a little bit harder.
Now that our application has been build, it’s time to deploy it to our app service in Azure.
In DevOps, go to Repos > Releases and hit the blue button New pipeline (or choose New at the top of your pipelines if you already have pipelines running). Now you can start to define where and how the artifact of your build has to be deployed.
You can start off directly with choosing a template, let’s go for the Azure App Service deployment template. This template will add a task to our pipeline which deploys a build artifact to an app service in Azure.
Click the 1 job, 1 task link in our newly added stage
Next, we need to map our build artifact with this new release build. If you click the 'Add an artifact button on the the left side of our release plan, you get to configure where to fetch the artifact from:
The final step! Deploy the artifact of your build to the app service in the Azure cloud.
Go to Pipelines > Releases and click the newly created pipeline; click the blue button Create a Release.
DevOps will automatically start to deploy to our ‘staging environment’ stage, but in the window above you could choose to set this to ‘manual’. Our latest build is also automatically selected, so all we have to do is to hit the blue button Create.
Once created, browse to this new release to check the status:
You can go directly into the logs of each of the steps by clicking on the ‘staging environment’ box:
Wait until all the tasks are finished and you see only green checkmarks.
Now you can browse to you app service within Azure and see you application in action!
name: $(date:yyyyMMdd)$(rev:.r)_$(Build.SourceBranchName)
and many more…
Also, have a look at all the possible pipeline tasks and release tasks. I’ve only shown some of the basic tasks that can be performed, but there is so much more that you can do within a DevOps pipeline, like running PowerShell scripts, run Angular CLI commands, copy/move files, modify Azure settings or resources, run Bash scripts, run Docker/Kubernetes commands, FTP actions, run Python scripts, Gulp, NodeJS, NPM, Maven etc etc