Moving an Azure DevOps repo to use Github Actions instead

In this blog post, I am going to take an existing web application that resides in Azure DevOps and port it to build and deploy within GitHub and use GitHub Actions to build and deploy the same site to GitHub.

Here you can see I have a website in Visual Studio which is currently pointing at a repository inside Azure Devops.

And here is what it looks like inside Visual Studio 2019 with the connection to Azure DevOps.

Now I am going to remove the connection from the Azure DevOps repo by clicking on remove like so:-

When I click on remove, this removes the connection from the code to the Azure DevOps repository. Then I go to the Sync area and it now asks me where do I want to push the code to.

This time I choose to Publish to GitHub.

Give the new repository a name (for within GitHub) and press Publish

This will push the code to a new GitHub repository called AzureGlobalBootCamp2020 which you can now see below.

Now we need to create a GitHub Action so that the code is built and pushed to Azure (like it was from within Azure DevOps previously).

From within your new GitHub repo click on Actions at the top.

I then chose Setup a new workflow yourself

This will take you to a screen and create a main.yaml file.

name: Deploy ASP.NET Core app to Azure Web App

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - '*'
# CONFIGURATION
# For help, go to https://github.com/Azure/Actions
#
# 1. Set up the following secrets in your repository:
#   AZURE_WEBAPP_PUBLISH_PROFILE
#
# 2. Change these variables for your configuration:
env:
  AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME: AzureGlobalBootCamp2020     # set this to your application's name
  AZURE_WEBAPP_PACKAGE_PATH: '.'                 # set this to the path to your web app project, defaults to the repository root
  DOTNET_VERSION: '3.1.100'                      # set this to the dot net version to use

jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:

      # Checkout the repo
      - uses: actions/checkout@master
      
      # Setup .NET Core SDK
      - name: Setup .NET Core
        uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
        with:
          dotnet-version: ${{ env.DOTNET_VERSION }} 
      
      # Run dotnet build and publish
      - name: dotnet build and publish
        run: |
          dotnet build --configuration Release
          dotnet publish -c Release -o '${{ env.AZURE_WEBAPP_PACKAGE_PATH }}/myapp' 
          
      # Deploy to Azure Web apps
      - name: 'Run Azure webapp deploy action using publish profile credentials'
        uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v2
        with: 
          app-name: ${{ env.AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME }} # Replace with your app name
          publish-profile: ${{ secrets.azureWebAppPublishProfile  }} # Define secret variable in repository settings as per action documentation
          package: '${{ env.AZURE_WEBAPP_PACKAGE_PATH }}/myapp'

# For more samples to get started with GitHub Action workflows to deploy to Azure, refer to https://github.com/Azure/actions-workflow-samples

I then pasted this into the main.yaml file and changed the following:-

AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME: AzureGlobalBootCamp2020
DOTNET_VERSION: ‘3.1.100‘
publish-profile: ${{ secrets.azureWebAppPublishProfile }}

The last entry above publish-profile requires you to create a new secret in GitHub under Settings -> Secrets and call it azureWebAppPublishProfile and you need to paste in the publishing profile from your Azure Web App

The above screen shows me in the Azure Portal and I’ve clicked into my Azure App Service and when I click on Get Publish Profile it downloads the content of the Publish profile which I paste into the new Secret with GitHub.

And with that we are done, GitHub will kick off the GitHub Action and built and deploy my web app changes when I publish any change to GitHub right into Azure for me.

Note
To read more on using GitHub Actions with .Net you can read more on GitHub here -> https://github.com/actions/setup-dotnet

Feel free to comment below if this is useful or if you have any feedback etc.