Create a Node.js Web App and deploy it to Azure

We will create a Node.js app and deploy it to azure. To do so we will save some time by working with some sample code.

we will clone a repository containing our Node.js app
we will create the web app, we will utilise the command up that will give us some smart defaults for resource group and price plan
show how to manage the app

Let's begin

Getting the sample app

First step is localising the sample app and clone its repository, like so:

git clone https://github.com/Azure-Samples/nodejs-docs-hello-world

Navigating into nodejs-docs-hello-world and running npm start, tells us the app is up and running on http://localhost:1337. Navigating there in our browser shows us the following:

creating the web app

Let's now create the web app using our azure cli. We need to type the following:

az webapp up -n <app_name>

Let's give it a unique name. This will create the following for us:

a default resource group
a default price plan
set the deployment type to zip deploy

This will attempt to create the default resource group and the default price plan but will most likely say they already exist and carry on creating the web app. This might take a little while

The command above will output a JSON response containing the key app_url. Take that value and enter the URL in your browser. It should look like this:

manage the app

of course we know we have gone for a quick and dirty way of creating our app and deployed it to azure. How do we change in the source code and redeploy it?

Well that is really easy. We just need to do the following:

change the code and save it
run our azure command again and wait for it to be updated

Change and save the code

Let's add the following change and have it output hello chris instead:

redploy the app

Let's run our command again:

az webapp up -n <app_name>

Let's inspect the web site when the command has run to a finish:

Boom, there it is. Our site is updated. Almost too easy :)

Summary

we have managed to create a Node.js app from a sample repository and we have also deployed said app to azure. We have used a short cut for deploying namely the command az webapp up. That command has set some defaults for us on resource group as well as pricing plan and also set our deployment type to zip deploy, which essentially zips up our files and send them to the deployment server.

In a real scenario we would need to use a little bit different approach as described in this article Python Web App deploy, where we create our own deployment user, resource group, price plan etc. This is definitely a good approach if you want to code up something quick and dirty and deploy it and show people.

Node.js web app deploy