Solution.md

Coding Challenge 1: Proposed solution

The goal of the first coding challenge was to deploy the sample web application on Azure App Service by

1. provisioning the Azure hosting infrastructure using the Terraform CLI
2. deploy the application from a GitHub repo using App Service Deployment Center continuous deployment. At this time, we're not yet setting up a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline to deploy the application onto App Service.

Step 1: Provision the hosting infrastructure on Azure

In the Terraform folder, you can find our Terraform main.tf that provisions all resources on Azure. To deploy on Azure App Service, you will need to provision several individual Azure resources:

• Resource Group
• App Service Plan
• App Service

To allow our script to flexibly deploy in another subscription, use different resource names, or leverage a different deployment location, we're storing these as variables in a Terraform variables.tf file.

When provisioning the App Service, make sure you also configure the App Settings accordingly, as part of the App Service resource!

resource "azurerm_app_service" "main" {
    name                = "${var.prefix}-appservice"
    location            = azurerm_resource_group.main.location
    resource_group_name = azurerm_resource_group.main.name
    app_service_plan_id = azurerm_app_service_plan.main.id

    site_config {
        always_on           = true
        default_documents   = [
            "Default.htm",
            "Default.html",
            "hostingstart.html"
        ]
    }

    app_settings = {
        "WEBSITE_NODE_DEFAULT_VERSION"  = "10.15.2"
        "ApiUrl"                        = ""
        "ApiUrlShoppingCart"            = ""
        "MongoConnectionString"         = ""
        "SqlConnectionString"           = ""
        "productImagesUrl"              = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/TailwindTraders-Backend/master/Deploy/tailwindtraders-images/product-detail"
        "Personalizer__ApiKey"          = ""
        "Personalizer__Endpoint"        = ""
    }
}

Step 2: Configure GitHub continuous deployment

To configure the GitHub continuous deployment, we've used the Azure CLI, as described in the config-github.ps1 script.

param([Parameter(Mandatory)][string] $GitHubRepo = "https://github.com/microsoft/TailwindTraders-Website", 
        [string] $branch = "main", 
        [Parameter(Mandatory)][string] $AppServiceName, 
        [Parameter(Mandatory)][string] $ResourceGroupName)
az webapp deployment source config --branch $branch --manual-integration --name $AppServiceName --repo-url $GitHubRepo --resource-group $ResourceGroupName

The script takes 4 input parameters:

• GitHub repository name - this is the location of the sample application
• GitHub Branch name
• Target App Service name
• Target Resource Group name

These parameters are then used as an input for the az webapp deployment Azure CLI command, which will configure the continuous deployment settings of the App Service.