Provisioning Azure App Services to host your Hello World webapp

15 Mar 2023 🔖 beginner azure web development 💬 EN

Thus far in this series, we’ve written the world’s tiniest webserver, added unit tests to its codebase, told Azure DevOps (“ADO”) Pipelines to auto-build a runnable web server for us each time we update our Git-tracked source code, and told ADO to fail the build process if the unit tests don’t pass.

Before we can ask friends to visit our new website, we’ll need to rent a webserver host from Microsoft Azure’s public cloud.

Azure App Service’s (“AAS’s”) Web Apps service (“AASWA”) is a great choice for a simple web server. Let’s rent ourselves two such resource instances:

Provisioning an Azure Resource Group

14 Mar 2023 🔖 beginner azure 💬 EN

Before we rent a web server from Microsoft Azure’s cloud, we’ll need set up a home for our web server in Azure called a “Resource Group.”

Logging your command line into Azure

13 Mar 2023 🔖 beginner azure 💬 EN

To rent resources from Microsoft Azure’s public cloud, we need to be logged into it.

Failing Azure DevOps Pipeline builds if unit tests fail

12 Mar 2023 🔖 web development minimum viable build beginner devops git azure 💬 EN

1. We’ve built the world’s tiniest webserver.
2. We’ve added unit tests that can help us predict whether it would run “correctly.”
3. We’ve told Azure DevOps (“ADO”) Pipelines to auto-build a runnable web server for us each time we update Git-tracked source code.
4. How about having Azure DevOps fail the auto-build if our unit tests fail?

Let’s do it!

See the sample codebase on GitHub.

Making Azure DevOps Pipelines build a Hello World webapp from Git-tracked source code changes

11 Mar 2023 🔖 web development minimum viable build beginner devops git azure 💬 EN

Now that we know how to code and build a “runtime” for a tiny webserver, thanks to this series’s kickoff article, let’s make someone else’s computer in the cloud do that for us instead.

We’ll put a copy of our source code into Azure DevOps (“ADO”) Repositories (“repos”) and track changes to the source code using the Git version control protocol.

We’ll ask ADO’s Pipelines feature to keep an eye on the “main” branch of our source code’s repository. We’ll instruct it to build a fresh webserver “runtime” out of the latest copy of our source code every time we edit our source code.

See the sample codebase on GitHub.

Protecting Git branches in Azure DevOps repositories

10 Mar 2023 🔖 devops git azure 💬 EN

Before – or instantly after – you first store any given codebase (like a tiny webserver) in Azure DevOps (“ADO”) Repositories (“repos”), I recommend protecting certain branches like “main,” protecting them from being directly edited.

Locally unit-testing source code for a Node.js Hello World webapp

09 Mar 2023 🔖 web development minimum viable build beginner 💬 EN

Let’s add some unit tests to the tiny webserver we built and ran this series’s kickoff article.

See the sample codebase on GitHub.

Source code that builds locally into a Node.js Hello World webapp

08 Mar 2023 🔖 web development minimum viable build beginner 💬 EN

Let’s take a look at the smallest Node.js website you can easily run on your local computer.

See the sample codebase on GitHub.

CI/CD get-to-know-you questions

07 Mar 2023 🔖 devops git 💬 EN

Here are some questions I recently found myself scheduling a meeting to ask the director of a team of developers who’d like to modernize their CI/CD practices.

Running UI tests in GitHub Actions

17 Feb 2023 🔖 devops web development integration git azure 💬 EN

Think of UI testing frameworks like Selenium and Playwright as pseudo-programming-languages that you use from inside another programming language, like:

• Arithmetic
• Regular expressions

Once you think of them this way, it’s easier to understand why there’s a bit of overhead to get them running without human intervention, like in a GitHub Action.