So far, we haven't talked much about Azure or Node.js on either of my blogs. The only Azure-specific post that I could find was the MS is EOLing Azure Functions which use .NET Core 3.1 on December 3 from July. I figured that we would address that, today. In today's tutorial, we are going to be covering how to deploy a node app to Azure using the command-line.
Prerequisites: Node, NPM, and Azure CLI
Before we go any further, you should make sure that you have node and NPM installed and that you have the Azure CLI installed. You can see if you have node installed by running node --version from the terminal.
Step 1: Create a Node.js app to deploy
For this example, we'll use the Express Generator. You can create your new app by running npx express-generator node-example --view ejs.
Next, if you cd node-example && npm install, you will navigate into the project folder and install the dependencies.
At this point, you can run the server by just running npm start.
If you want to get the debugging info also, you can alternately run DEBUG=node-example:* npm start.
With the server running, you can see the output at http://localhost:3000/.
Step 2: Change the server port
As you can see above, the server is using port 3000 but if you open bin/www and look for process.env.PORT, you can change what port the startup script uses.
If we are going to deploy this to Azure, we should probably change that to 80.
Step 3: Deploy to Azure
From within the project folder, you can deploy the project by running az webapp up --sku F1 --name <unique-project-name>. The <unique-project-name> bit must be a value that is unique across all of azure and contain only characters that are a-z, 0-9, and -. The F1 SKU is on their free-pricing tier.
At this point, your node app is live. You can see the demo app at http://jws-node-example.azurewebsites.net.
Step 4: Redeploying to Azure
The next, natural question is how to redeploy the app after you make changes to it. If we look at routes/index.js, the variable title is set to the value "Express" on line 6.
If we change that value to "Flavortown", it should change the output on the site. To save your changes to Azure, you can use the terminal command az webapp up.
You will notice that the command that we used had no arguments. If you look into .azure/config within the project folder, the details are defined there. If you need to change something, you can do it there.
Now, our demo site says "Welcome to Flavortown".
Have any questions, comments, or concerns? See something that I am doing wrong here? Please feel free to drop a comment, below. I am by no means an expert in Node or Azure but hopefully we can help each other.
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