Manually provision resources and publish a bot to Azure (Preview)

This article covers script-based instructions to manually provision resources and publish a bot built using Composer to Azure Web App (Preview) and Azure Functions (Preview).

Prerequisites

• A subscription to Microsoft Azure.
• A basic bot built using Composer.
• Latest version of the Azure CLI.
• Node.js. Use version 12.13.0 or later.
• PowerShell version 6.0 and later.

Provision Azure resources

This section covers steps to provision required Azure resources using JavaScript scripts. If you already have your Azure resources provisioned, skip to the publish a bot to Azure section.

Follow these instructions to manually provision Azure resources:

1. Open a new Command Prompt and navigate to the scripts folder of your bot's project folder. For example:

   cd C:\Users\UserName\Documents\Composer\BotName\scripts

2. Run the following command to install the dependencies:

   npm install

3. Run the following command to provision new Azure resources.

   • Azure Web App (Preview):

   node provisionComposer.js --subscriptionId=<YOUR AZURE SUBSCRIPTION ID> --name=<NAME OF YOUR RESOURCE GROUP> --appPassword=<APP PASSWORD> --environment=<NAME FOR ENVIRONMENT DEFAULT to dev>

   • Azure Functions (Preview):

   node provisionComposer.js --subscriptionId=<YOUR AZURE SUBSCRIPTION ID> --name=<NAME OF YOUR RESOURCE GROUP> --appPassword=<APP PASSWORD> --environment=<NAME FOR ENVIRONMENT DEFAULT to dev> --customArmTemplate=DeploymentTemplates/function-template-with-preexisting-rg.json

   Property	Description
   Your Azure Subscription ID	Find it in your Azure resource in the Subscription ID field.
   Name of your resource group	The name you give to the resource group you are creating.
   App password	At least 16 characters with at least one number, one letter, and one special character.
   Name for environment	The name you give to the publish environment.

   Once completed, the provision scripts will create the following resources in the Azure portal:

   Resource	Required/Optional
   App Service plan	Required
   App Service	Required
   Application Registration	Required
   Azure Cosmos DB	Optional
   Application Insights	Optional
   Azure Blob Storage	Optional
   LUIS authoring resource (Cognitive Services)	Optional
   LUIS prediction resource (Cognitive Services)	Optional
   QnA Maker resources (Cognitive Services)	Optional

   [!TIP] Read the parameters list to customize the provision scripts and create the Azure resources you want.

   1. You will be asked to login to the Azure portal in your browser.

      

   2. If you see the error message "InsufficientQuota", add a param '--createLuisAuthoringResource false' and run the script again.

      • Azure Web App:

      node provisionComposer.js --subscriptionId=<YOUR AZURE SUBSCRIPTION ID> --name=<NAME OF YOUR RESOURCE GROUP>--appPassword=<APP PASSWORD> --environment=<NAME FOR ENVIRONMENT DEFAULT to dev> --createLuisAuthoringResource false

      • Azure Functions:

      node provisionComposer.js --subscriptionId=<YOUR AZURE SUBSCRIPTION ID> --name=<NAME OF YOUR RESOURCE GROUP> --appPassword=<APP PASSWORD> --environment=<NAME FOR ENVIRONMENT DEFAULT to dev> --createLuisAuthoringResource false --customArmTemplate=DeploymentTemplates/function-template-with-preexisting-rg.json

      [!NOTE] If you use --createLuisAuthoringResource false in this step, you should manually add the LUIS authoring key to the publish configuration in the deploy bot to new Azure resources section. The default region is westus. To provision to other regions, you should add --location region.

4. As the Azure resources are being provisioned, which takes a few minutes, you will see the following:

   

   Once completed, you will see the generated JSON appears in the command line like the following. The JSON output is the publishing profile, which will be used in step 3 of the Publish a bot to Azure section.

   {
     "accessToken": "<SOME VALUE>",
     "name": "<NAME OF YOUR RESOURCE GROUP>",
     "environment": "<ENVIRONMENT>",
     "hostname": "<NAME OF THE HOST>",
     "luisResource": "<NAME OF YOUR LUIS RESOURCE>",
     "settings": {
       "applicationInsights": {
         "InstrumentationKey": "<SOME VALUE>"
       },
       "cosmosDb": {
         "cosmosDBEndpoint": "<SOME VALUE>",
         "authKey": "<SOME VALUE>",
         "databaseId": "botstate-db",
         "collectionId": "botstate-collection",
         "containerId": "botstate-container"
       },
       "blobStorage": {
         "connectionString": "<SOME VALUE>",
         "container": "transcripts"
       },
       "luis": {
         "endpointKey": "<SOME VALUE>",
         "authoringKey": "<SOME VALUE>",
         "region": "westus"
       },
       "qna": {
         "endpoint": "<SOME VALUE>",
         "subscriptionKey": "<SOME VALUE>"
       },
       "MicrosoftAppId": "<SOME VALUE>",
       "MicrosoftAppPassword": "<SOME VALUE>"
     }
   }

Publish a bot to Azure

This section covers instructions to publish a bot to Azure using PowerShell scripts. Make sure you already have required Azure resources provisioned before publishing a bot, if not, follow these instructions from the provision Azure resources section.

Follow these steps to manually publish a bot to Azure:

1. Install the required dependencies.

   bf command

   npm i -g @microsoft/botframework-cli@next

   bf plugins

   bf plugins:install @microsoft/bf-sampler-cli@beta

2. Eject your bot's C# runtime.

3. Save your publishing profile in json format (the JSON output from step 4 of the provision Azure resources section and execute the following command:

   .\Scripts\deploy.ps1 -publishProfilePath <path to your publishing profile>

Note

Make sure you set the correct subscription when running the scripts to publish your bot. Use the Azure CLI command az account set --subscription to set subscription if needed. The publishing process will take a couple of minutes to finish.

Refresh your Azure Token

Follow these steps to get a new token if you encounter an error about your access token being expired:

• Open a terminal window.
• Run az account get-access-token.
• This will result in a JSON object containing the new accessToken, printed to the console.
• Copy the value of the accessToken from the terminal and into the publish accessToken field in the profile in Composer.

Additional information

Provision scripts parameters list

You don't need to create a complete list of the Azure resources as covered in step 3 of the provision Azure resources section. The following is a table of the parameters you can use to customize the provision scripts so that you only provision the resources needed.

Parameter	Required/Optional	Default value	Description
subscriptionId	Required	N/A	Your Azure subscription ID.
name	Required	N/A	The name of your resource group
appPassword	Required	N/A	The password to create the resource. It must be at least 16 characters long, contain at least 1 upper or lower case alphabetical character, and contain at least 1 special character
environment	Optional	dev	N/A
location	Optional	westus	Your Azure resource group region
tenantId	Optional	default tenantId	ID of your tenant if required.
customArmTemplate	Optional	/DeploymentTemplates/template-with-preexisting-rg.json	For Azure Functions or your own template for a custom deployment.
createLuisResource	Optional	true	The LUIS prediction resource to create. Region is default to westus and cannot be changed.
createLuisAuthoringResource	Optional	true	The LUIS authoring resource to create. Region is default to westus and cannot be changed.
createQnAResource	Optional	true	The QnA resource to create.
createCosmosDB	Optional	true	The CosmosDB resource to create.
createStorage	Optional	true	The BlobStorage resource to create.
createAppInsights	Optional	true	The AppInsights resource to create.