As a follow-up on the presentation I did at CloudBrew about Azure Static Web Apps I want to write a series of blog posts.
- Part I - Using the VS Code Extension
- Part II - Using the Astro Static Site Generator
- Part III (this post) – Deploying to multiple environments
So far we have deployed our application to one environment, the production environment. Your custom domain points to this environment, and content served from this location is indexed by search engines.
However it is possible to use 3 other types of (staging) environments:
-
Pull requests: Pull requests against your production branch deploy to a temporary environment that disappears after the pull request is closed. The URL for this environment includes the PR number as a suffix. For example, if you make your first PR, the preview location looks something like
<DEFAULT_HOST_NAME>-1.<LOCATION>.azurestaticapps.net. -
Branch: You can optionally configure your site to deploy every change made to branches that aren't a production branch. This preview deployment is published at a stable URL that includes the branch name. For example, if the branch is named
dev, then the environment is available at a location like<DEFAULT_HOST_NAME>-dev.<LOCATION>.azurestaticapps.net. -
Named environment: You can configure your pipeline to deploy all changes to a named environment. This preview deployment is published at a stable URL that includes the environment name. For example, if the deployment environment is named
release, then the environment is available at a location like<DEFAULT_HOST_NAME>-release.<LOCATION>.azurestaticapps.net.
Remark: If you are using the Free plan, you are limited to 3 staging environments. The Standard plan gives you 10 staging environments.
Before we can start using staging environments, we need to update our Github Actions workflow and explicitly specify our production environment in the static-web-apps-deploy step:
Now we can specify a PR trigger to create a PR environment:
Or add extra branches that should result in extra environments:
Remark: If you want to create an environment for every branch, you can specify “**” instead of the list of branch names
It is also possible to deploy to a specific named environment, therefore you need to specify the deployment_environment value in the static-web-apps-deploy step:
You can watch the list of deployed environments in the Azure Portal:
More information
Preview environments in Azure Static Web Apps | Microsoft Learn