In this blog post, I want to write about how you can deploy your ASP.NET Core Web App running on .NET 5 to Azure with GitHub Actions.

Table of content

GitHub Actions use a yaml format as well as the new Azure pipelines, but their format is a little bit different. However, I want to move more and more into GitHub Actions because I enjoy having my code and my build together and most of my repositories are stored in GitHub since private repositories are free.

TL;DR

Complete Example

What you need

What you need is an existing Azure Web App. Inside the Azure Web App make sure that you download the publish profile.

Once downloaded open your repository on GitHub and switch to the Settings tab choosing Secrets from the menu on the left.

Add a name for the secret and Copy the raw xml content of the publishsettings file you downloaded in there.

The variable MY_SECRET_PUBLISH_PROFILE is needed for the Azure deployment trough the yaml file.

Structure of the repository

In the GitHub repository, we have a file structure where we have frontend and backend separated. So we have to deploy an ASP.NET Core app from a subfolder which we will do in the *.yml file.

├── .github // <- add this folder
├── frontend
├── backend
   └── aspnetcore
        ├── Folder1
        ├── Folder2
        ├── ...
        └── MyAppSolution.sln

Inside of this folder we will create a workflows folder and then a dotnetcore.yml where we place our yaml definition to describe the pipeline.

├── .github
    └── workflows               // <- add this folder
        └── dotnet-core.yml    // <- add this file
├── frontend
├── backend
   └── aspnetcore
        ├── Folder1
        ├── Folder2
        ├── ...
        └── MyAppSolution.sln

Now let us set up the yaml pipeline:

We want to listen to the main branch, including the pull requests:

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, synchronize, reopened, closed]
    branches:
      - main

Next, we can configure environment variables describing our build environment. In this case we want to provide an app name for our build pipeline and a working directory as we are NOT working in root but in a nested folder called backend/aspnetcore.

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, synchronize, reopened, closed]
    branches:
      - main
env:
  AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME: sampletodobackend
  WORKING_DIRECTORY: backend/aspnetcore

Configuring the build steps

Now let us define the build steps one by one:

1. Checkout and Setup .NET Core
2. Install the dependencies
3. Build
4. Test
5. Publish locally
6. Upload that artifact to Azure

in yaml:

    // ...other things
    steps:
        # Checkout and Setup .NET Core
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Setup .NET Core
        uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
        with:
          dotnet-version: '5.0.100'
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: dotnet restore
      - name: Build
        run: dotnet build --configuration Release --no-restore
      - name: Test
        run: dotnet test --no-restore --verbosity normal
      - name: dotnet publish
        run: dotnet publish --configuration Release --output 'dotnetcorewebapp'

Notice that we publish to a folder dotnetcorewebapp which does NOT need the prefix of the working directory, because we are already there.

Now the last step is to publish. But here we need the complete path when we provide the artefact or package to publish! With a ${{ }} syntax we can use the MY_SECRET_PUBLISH_PROFILE secret from GitHub we created in the first step of this blog.

      - name: 'Deploy to Azure WebApp'
        uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v2
        with:
          app-name: ${{ env.AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME }}
          publish-profile: ${{ secrets.MY_SECRET_PUBLISH_PROFILE }}
          package: '${{ env.WORKING_DIRECTORY }}/dotnetcorewebapp'

And that is it!

Complete Example

name: .NET Core
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, synchronize, reopened, closed]
    branches:
      - main
env:
  AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME: sampletodobackend
  WORKING_DIRECTORY: backend/aspnetcore
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    defaults:
      run:
        shell: bash
        working-directory: ${{ env.WORKING_DIRECTORY }}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Setup .NET Core
        uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
        with:
          dotnet-version: '5.0.100'
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: dotnet restore
      - name: Build
        run: dotnet build --configuration Release --no-restore
      - name: Test
        run: dotnet test --no-restore --verbosity normal
      - name: dotnet publish
        run: dotnet publish --configuration Release --output 'dotnetcorewebapp'
      - name: 'Deploy to Azure WebApp'
        uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v2
        with:
          app-name: ${{ env.AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME }}
          publish-profile: ${{ secrets.MY_SECRET_PUBLISH_PROFILE }}
          package: '${{ env.WORKING_DIRECTORY }}/dotnetcorewebapp'

Hope this helps

Fabian