Use Azure Key Vault for Secrets in Azure DevOps Pipelines

This blog shows how Azure Key Vault can be used in an Azure DevOps Pipeline build. By using Azure Key Vault to handle all your secrets or certificates, no secrets need to be saved to code, files, or other storage for the initial secrets required in a solution.

#azure #devops #azure cli #azure key vault #key vault

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Use Azure Key Vault for Secrets in Azure DevOps Pipelines

This blog shows how Azure Key Vault can be used in an Azure DevOps Pipeline build. By using Azure Key Vault to handle all your secrets or certificates, no secrets need to be saved to code, files, or other storage for the initial secrets required in a solution.

#azure #devops #azure cli #azure key vault #key vault

Azure DevOps Pipelines: Multi-Stage Pipelines

The last couple of posts have been dealing with Release managed from the Releases area under Azure Pipelines. This week we are going to take what we were doing in that separate area of Azure DevOps and instead make it part of the YAML that currently builds our application. If you need some background on how the project got to this point check out the following posts.

Getting Started with Azure DevOps

Pipeline Creation in Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps Publish Artifacts for ASP.NET Core

Azure DevOps Pipelines: Multiple Jobs in YAML

Azure DevOps Pipelines: Reusable YAML

Azure DevOps Pipelines: Use YAML Across Repos

Azure DevOps Pipelines: Conditionals in YAML

Azure DevOps Pipelines: Naming and Tagging

Azure DevOps Pipelines: Manual Tagging

Azure DevOps Pipelines: Depends On with Conditionals in YAML

Azure DevOps Pipelines: PowerShell Task

Azure DevOps Releases: Auto Create New Release After Pipeline Build

Azure DevOps Releases: Auto Create Release with Pull Requests

Recap

The current setup we have uses a YAML based Azure Pipeline to build a couple of ASP.NET Core web applications. Then on the Release side, we have basically a dummy release that doesn’t actually do anything but served as a demo of how to configure a continuous deployment type release. The following is the current YAML for our Pipeline for reference.

name: $(SourceBranchName)_$(date:yyyyMMdd)$(rev:.r)

resources:      
  repositories: 
  - repository: Shared
    name: Playground/Shared
    type: git 
    ref: master #branch name

trigger: none

variables:
  buildConfiguration: 'Release'

jobs:
- job: WebApp1
  displayName: 'Build WebApp1'
  pool:
    vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

  steps:
  - task: PowerShell@2
    inputs:
      targetType: 'inline'
      script: 'Get-ChildItem -Path Env:\'

  - template: buildCoreWebProject.yml@Shared
    parameters:
      buildConFiguration: $(buildConfiguration)
      project: WebApp1.csproj
      artifactName: WebApp1

- job: WebApp2
  displayName: 'Build WebApp2'
  condition: and(succeeded(), eq(variables['BuildWebApp2'], 'true'))
  pool:
    vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

  steps:
  - template: build.yml
    parameters:
      buildConFiguration: $(buildConfiguration)
      project: WebApp2.csproj
      artifactName: WebApp2

- job: DependentJob
  displayName: 'Build Dependent Job'
  pool:
    vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

  dependsOn:
  - WebApp1
  - WebApp2

  steps:
  - template: buildCoreWebProject.yml@Shared
    parameters:
      buildConFiguration: $(buildConfiguration)
      project: WebApp1.csproj
      artifactName: WebApp1Again

- job: TagSources
  displayName: 'Tag Sources'
  pool:
    vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

  dependsOn:
  - WebApp1
  - WebApp2
  - DependentJob
  condition: |
    and
    (
      eq(dependencies.WebApp1.result, 'Succeeded'),
      in(dependencies.WebApp2.result, 'Succeeded', 'Skipped'),
      in(dependencies.DependentJob.result, 'Succeeded', 'Skipped')
    )

  steps:
  - checkout: self
    persistCredentials: true
    clean: true
    fetchDepth: 1

  - task: PowerShell@2
    inputs:
      targetType: 'inline'
      script: |
        $env:GIT_REDIRECT_STDERR` = '2>&1'
        $tag = "manual_$(Build.BuildNumber)".replace(' ', '_')
        git tag $tag
        Write-Host "Successfully created tag $tag" 

        git push --tags
         Write-Host "Successfully pushed tag $tag"     

      failOnStderr: false

#azure-pipelines #azure #azure-devops #devops

Use Azure Static Web Apps with Azure DevOps pipelines

In this post, we discuss how to use Azure Static Web Apps from a pipeline in Azure DevOps.Last year, Microsoft released Azure Static Web Apps, a great way to bundle your static app with a serverless Azure Functions backend. If you have a GitHub repository, Azure Static Web Apps has you covered. You create an instance in Azure, select a GitHub repository, and Azure creates a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline for you that’ll automatically trigger when you merge a pull request into your main branch. It’s still in preview, but a GA release isn’t too far off.

To borrow from a famous Henry Ford quote: you can have it from any repo you want, so long as it’s GitHub.

That has changed. Azure Static Web Apps now provides Azure DevOps support. If you have a repository in Azure DevOps, you can wire up an Azure Pipelines YAML file that builds and deploys your app to Azure Static Web Apps. While it isn’t as streamlined and elegant as the GitHub experience—you need to configure your deployment token manually, and you don’t get automatic staging environments—it sure beats the alternative for Azure DevOps customers (that is, no Azure Static Web Apps support at all).

#devops #azure #azure devops #pipelines

Create Azure Infrastructure with Azure DevOps and Azure CLI Powershell scripts

In Azure DevOps, Pipelines can be used to create Azure infrastructure using Azure CLI and Powershell. This blog shows how to create a simple resource group in Azure using Azure DevOps Pipelines.

#azure #devops #azure cli #key vault #pipelines #powershell

Automating deployments to on premise servers with Azure DevOps

As someone who has spent most of their (very short) career doing one click cloud resource deployments, I was shocked when I jumped onto a legacy project and realised the complexity of the deployment process to staging and production. Using a traditional .NET Framework application stack, the deployment process consisted of the following steps:

1. Set the configuration target in Visual Studio to release
2. Build the project
3. Copy the .dlls using a USB to a client laptop which was configured for VPN access
4. Copy the .dlls via RDP to the target server
5. Go into IIS Manager and point the file path to the new version of the application

As you can see and may have experienced, this is a long, slow and error-prone process which can often take over an hour given likelihood of one of those steps not working correctly. For me it was also a real pain point having to use the client laptop, as it had 3 different passwords to get in, none of which I set or could remember. It also meant if we needed to do a deployment I had to be in the office to physically use the laptop — no working from home that day.

My first step was to automate the build process. If we could get Azure Pipelines to at least build the project, I could download the files and copy them over manually. There are plenty of guides online on how to set this up, but the final result meant it gave me a .zip artifact of all the files required for the project. This also took away a common hotspot for errors, which was building locally on my machine. This also meant regardless of who wrote the code, the build process was always identical.

The second step was to** set up a release pipeline**. Within Azure Pipelines, what we wanted to do was create a deployment group, and then register the server we want to deploy to as a target within that deployment group. This will allow us to deploy directly to an on premise server. So, how do we do this?

Requirements:

• PowerShell 3.0 or higher. On our Windows Server 2003 box, we needed to upgrade from PowerShell 2.0. This is a simple download, install and restart.
• .NET Framework x64 4.5 or higher

Steps:

1. Navigate to Deployment Groups under Pipelines in Azure DevOps:

Deployment groups menu item in Azure DevOps > Pipelines

2. Create a new deployment group. The idea is you can have several servers that are in the same group and deploy the code to all of them simultaneously (for example for load balancing reasons). In my case I only have one target in my deployment group, so the idea of a group is a bit redundant.

#azure #azure-pipelines #deployment-pipelines #windows-server #azure-devops #devops