Continuous deployment

From the Azure portal

The Azure portal makes it easy to set up continuous deployment from GitHub, Bitbucket or Codeplex.

This documents discusses what happens under the cover. Inmost cases you don't need to worry about this. It may be useful to set up continuous deployment from a git host that the portal doesn't directly support.

Steps to set up continuous deployment from an externally hosted repo (e.g. GitHub/CodePlex/Bitbucket):

Getting the hook URL

The hook URL is the /deploy path on the Kudu service. So it looks like https://mysite.scm.azurewebsites.net/deploy. But since the service uses basic auth, you need to pass the creds in the URL. Typically, you'll want to use the site-level credentials here and not the user credentials (see Deployment-credentials). So the full URL will look like https://$mysite:BigRandomPassword@mysite.scm.azurewebsites.net/deploy

Note that you can also obtain this URL from the Azure Portal under the Configure tab, in the Deployment Trigger Url field.

Once you have the URL, you can set it as a GitHub/CodePlex/Bitbucket hook, either via OAuth, or manually from those sites.

The hook expects a POST request, and supports the payload from those various sites (which are all different).

Giving the private key to the Kudu service

If the repo is private, you will also need to set up an SSH key.

The public key is given to GitHub/Bitbucket, either manually or through their OAuth API.

The private key is given to the Kudu service. This can be done in two ways:

Using the REST API

using the PUT /sshkey REST API. The supported key format is privacy enhanced mail (PEM). Since Kudu runs as a service (no interactive), make sure the private key PEM is not encrypted with passphrase. The ssh-keygen command, by default, will solicit passphrase, do leave it blank.

One possible way to call the REST API is using curl. e.g.

curl --user username 'https://yoursite.scm.azurewebsites.net/sshkey' -X PUT --upload-file /c/users/me/.ssh/id_rsa

Manually over ftp (this is probably simpler)

You need to copy two files over FTP (see Accessing-files-via-ftp and File-structure-on-azure).

At the root, create a .ssh folder (i.e. .ssh is a sibling to the site folder) and create two files.

The first is named config (so .ssh\config) and should contain exactly:

HOST *
	  StrictHostKeyChecking no

The second is id_rsa and contains, your private key, e.g.

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIEoAIBAAKCAQEAxFkKAmZSruEVhq4g0LsDTBiKe/FXYcy1dzi/eHd4Cw32bq9H
EpUBFrMykK3TVc/pdL9PVD/oq3ikvAkDeZFYUDMso4vvMf5/FfmU2oCwRaESF545
etc...
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

Deleting the repository

You can do this from the Dashboard page on the Azure portal.

As an alternative, you can run the following curl command, using the same username/password that you use for git deployment:

curl --user yourusername -X DELETE https://yoursitename.scm.azurewebsites.net/live/scm