Effortless Django Deployment: Harness the Power of Azure App Service and GitHub Actions

 

Configuring Azure App Service

1. Sign in to the Azure portal (https://portal.azure.com/). 2. Click on the “Create a resource” button in the top left corner of the portal. 3. In the search bar, type “App Service” and select the first result “App Service”. 4. Click on the “Create” button. 5. In the “App service” blade, enter the following details:

• Subscription: Select the subscription you want to use for this App Service instance.
• Resource group: You can choose to create a new resource group or use an existing one. A resource group is a logical container for grouping related Azure resources.
• Name: Enter a unique name for your App Service instance.
• Publish: Select “Code” if you want to deploy your application code directly to the App Service instance. Select “Docker Container” if you want to run your application in a Docker container.
• Runtime stack: Select the programming language or framework that your application is built with. This will configure the necessary runtime environment for your application.
• Operating System: Choose the operating system you want to use for your App Service instance (Windows or Linux).
• Region: Select the region where you want your App Service instance to be hosted.

6. Click on the “Next: Monitoring” button at the bottom of the blade. 7. In the “Monitoring” tab, you can configure options for application insights, diagnostic logs, and alert rules. You can leave these settings as default for now and click on the “Review + create” button. 8. In the “Review + create” tab, review your settings and click on the “Create” button at the bottom. 9. Azure will validate your settings and create the App Service instance. 10. Once the deployment is complete, you can click on the “Go to resource” button to go to your App Service instance. Configuring App Service settings: 1. In the App Service instance blade, select “Configuration” from the left menu. 2. In the “Configuration” tab, you can configure various settings for your App Service:

• General Settings: Here you can configure the platform version, web sockets, ARR affinity, and other general settings for your App Service instance.
• CORS: You can configure Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) settings to allow access to your App Service from different origins.
• SSL settings: You can configure SSL settings to enable HTTPS for your App Service.
• Application settings: Here you can define custom settings for your application, such as database connection strings, API keys, and other application-specific settings.
• Connection strings: You can define database connection strings for your application to access databases or other external services.
• Custom domains: If you want to use a custom domain for your App Service, you can add it here.
• Docker configuration: If you are using Docker to deploy your application, you can define container settings here.
• Deployment slots: You can configure deployment slots to deploy your application to a staging environment before deploying to production.

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3. Once you have configured the settings as per your requirements, click on the “Save” button at the top of the blade. Congratulations, you have successfully created an App Service instance and configured its settings. You can now deploy your application code or Docker container to your App Service and access it through the given URL.

Integrating GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a powerful tool for automating development workflows, including building, testing, and deploying applications. In this guide, we will walk through how to create a GitHub Actions workflow to build, test, and deploy a Django application to Azure App Service. Step 1: Enable GitHub Actions To get started, navigate to your GitHub repository and click on the "Actions" tab. If you have not used GitHub Actions before, you will need to enable it by clicking the "Set up this workflow" button. Step 2: Create a new workflow Click on the "New workflow" button to start creating your workflow. Name your workflow and select the "Python application" template. This will automatically generate a YAML file with some basic workflow steps. Step 3: Define the trigger The "on" section of your YAML file defines when the workflow will be triggered. In our case, we want the workflow to run whenever a new commit is pushed to the master branch. To set this up, update the "on" section as follows: on: push: branches: [master] Step 4: Configure the build step The first step in our workflow will be to build our Django application. In the YAML file, find the "run" section and update the command to install our project dependencies and then run our tests: - name: Run tests run: | python -m pip install -r requirements.txt python manage.py test Step 5: Configure the deployment step After our application has been successfully built and tested, we can now deploy it to Azure App Service. To do this, we will use the Azure App Service Deploy GitHub Action. Add the following code to your YAML file to configure the deployment step: - name: Deploy Django app to Azure App Service uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v2 with: app-name: <your-app-name> publish-profile: ${{ secrets.AZURE_APP_PUBLISH_PROFILE }} package: . package-manifest: <optional-path-to-manifest-file> In this step, we are using a secret, AZURE_APP_PUBLISH_PROFILE, which contains our Azure App Service publish profile. This secret needs to be created in your repository's "Settings" tab > "Secrets" section. Step 6: Configure environment variables If your Django application requires any environment variables, you can add them as secrets in the "Settings" tab of your repository, like we did with the AZURE_APP_PUBLISH_PROFILE secret. Then, you can use the action's environment settings to map the secret to your application's environment variables. For example: environment: DJANGO_SECRET_KEY: ${{ secrets.DJANGO_SECRET_KEY }} Step 7: Save and test your workflow Once you have completed all the necessary configuration for your workflow, click the "Start commit" button to commit your changes and trigger the workflow. You can monitor the progress of your workflow in the "Actions" tab of your repository. If everything is configured correctly, your workflow should successfully build, test, and deploy your Django application to Azure App Service. Congratulations, you have now created a GitHub Actions workflow that automatically builds, tests, and deploys your Django application to Azure App Service. This will save you time and effort in your development process and help ensure a more efficient and error-free deployment process.