I've been playing, off and on, with Microsoft Azure for a while now. My main focus has been on the services areas (see my post comparing different visual recognition services) but I was also curious to see how well it worked as a PaaS for Node apps. About two or three months ago I tried to push a simple LoopBack app up and I was not successful. I put the blame on me for not reading the docs well, but it wasn't a good experience. About a week or so ago I was talking to a Microsoft employee about deployment in general and when I mentioned my last experience, he pointed me to this great tutorial:

Deploy to Azure using App Service

This tutorial walks you through the process of installing the Azure App Service extension into Visual Studio Code and then using it to deploy a Node app to Azure.

I'm not going to repeat what's in the tutorial as it generally just works fine as is. I will warn you about a few things you may run into while testing.

First, when you begin the authentication process, it will ask you to open a URL and enter a code:

Do NOT click! If you do, the little panel there will disappear, and if your memory is like mine, you won't remember the code. I had to quit VSC and restart it to get the prompt again. You can select text in the dialog and put it in your clipboard, or just jot it down.

Oops! So notice how in the screenshot above it says Copy. As in, um, Copy, like Ray, how could you miss that? Yep, that's all on me. I think maybe I was expecting it to pre-fill the form field with the code. Either way - just paste. Duh.

Secondly, for me the first deployment was incredibly slow. I'd say about ten minutes. Maybe LoopBack is big (honestly I never really thought about it). Maybe it was provisioning things. But for whatever reason, that first push was definitely slow. However, after that it moved incredibly quick. I'd say maybe 30 seconds, or quicker, to get the app updated.

Finally, the extension supports viewing logs from your application. That's cool, but it didn't always consistently work for me. That being said, last night when I was testing I was having a bit of trouble with it and this morning it seems to be working perfectly fine.

Finally, and a bit off topic, but if you develop Visual Studio Code extensions, check out this button from the guide:

Clicking this will open Visual Studio Code right to the marketplace and the extension. It's just a properly formatted URL but I was surprised to see it work so well. (Obviously you would need VSC installed for it to work properly.) Like any good webdev I did a quick Inspect Element to see the URL: vscode:extension/ms-azuretools.vscode-azureappservice. I'm surprised I don't see that used more often.

Header photo by Lisheng Chang on Unsplash