Is it possible to deploy ASP.NET Core websites to Azure using VS Azure Resource Group projects?
asp.net-core, azure, deployment, visual-studio
Solution
ASP.NET Core tooling has graduated but there is still no support for ASP.NET Core applications in Azure Resource Group projects. Since I use Visual Studio Team Services för build and release I solved this by simply creating an Azure Web App with the Azure Resource Group project and instead of linking my ASP.NET Core project to the resource group project (which works with ASP.NET 4.5) I let VSTS handle deploying the actual code to the Azure Web App. My release definition has two task:
- Azure Deployment:Create Or Update Resource Group (which creates the Azure Web App instance
- Deploy Azure App Service (which puts my code in the Azure Web App instance, instead of the placeholder code).
Problem
I have built, as a proof of concept, an ASP.NET MVC 4.5.2 website with an MySQL database and have deployed this to Azure using an Azure Resource Group project (based on https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/vs-azure-tools-resource-groups-deployment-projects-create-deploy/>), which works very well. I have, however, tried the same with an ASP.NET Core 1.0 website, which doesn't work, at least out-of-the-box - adding a reference from the ARG project to the website project doesn't seem to work properly and no WebDeploy package of the website is created upon deploy. I'm guessing that this will work sometime (perhaps when the Visual Studio tooling for .NET Core graduates) but maybe it is possible today by modifying the generated JSON and Powershell scripts?