How to deploy a static website to Azure from Visual Studio Team Services

Question

I have an existing website that I would like to deploy on Azure, using Visual Studio Team Services. The website is made up of static files, there's no ASP.NET or anything else involved.

Within Visual Studio Team Services, I created a build which executes npm install and a gulp build. This results in a dist folder containing all the files for the website. In Azure, everything is set up correctly (subscription, web app,...).

However, I'm unsure on how to push my code to Azure. Exploring the options in the Release tab in VSTS, an 'artifact' always seems to be required, but I just have a bunch of files. I need to publish the files in the dist folder and make sure index.html is served.

How can I do that?

This question is related to this one, however, the answers all state to start from Azure, and do not mention how to deploy existing code using Visual Studio Team Services.

Answer 1

The trick is to create the artifact yourself, which can be as simple as a zip file containing the static website files. The zip file should be copied as an artifact to the $(build.artifactstagingdirectory) target directory. Next, you can use a simple Web App deployment task to publish the zip file to Azure. If index.html is in the root directory, Azure is smart enough to serve it.

Below is a working build and deploy flow. It assumes gulp is used to build the website and write the build output (i.e. the static files) to a dist folder.

Answer 2

The easiest way is to deploy from a source control, if you take a look under "Settings" for your Website in the Azure portal you will probably see "Continuous deployment".

From there you can deploy from Visual Studio Team Services, Github, etc.

Every check-in will be deployed, also wrong ones, so you may want a introduce a staging environment as a deployment slot as well, where you can swap staging with production whenever you feel your site is ready for production.

Answer 3

Without the need to create an artifact, another solution could be FTP deployment after creating an Service Endpoint in VSTS