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 – Deploying to multiple environments
- Part IV – Password protect your environments
- Part V – Traffic splitting
- Part VI – Authentication using pre-configured providers
- Part VII – Application configuration using staticwebapp.config.json
- Part VIII – API Configuration
- Part IX – Injecting snippets
- Part X – Custom authentication
- Part XI – Authorization
- Part XII - Assign roles through an Azure function
- Part XIII - API integration
- Part XIV – Bring your own API
- Part XV – Pass authentication info to your linked API
- Part XVI – Distributed Functions
- Part XVII – Data API Builder
- Part XVIII(this post) - Deploy using Bicep
So far I’ve deployed our Azure Static Web App using Github Actions. But if you prefer to use an Infrastructure as Code(IaC) approach, I have good news! Because in this post I’ll show you how to deploy your SWA using Bicep.
If you are completely new to Bicep, I suggest to first take a look at the documentation to get a good introduction.
In short Bicep is a domain-specific language (DSL) that uses declarative syntax to deploy Azure resources. In a Bicep file, you define the infrastructure you want to deploy to Azure, and then use that file throughout the development lifecycle to repeatedly deploy your infrastructure.
It can be seen as an alternative for using ARM templates. The JSON syntax to create an ARM template can be verbose and require complicated expressions. Bicep syntax reduces that complexity and improves the development experience. During deployment, the Bicep CLI converts a Bicep file into ARM template JSON.
To help you get started I would recommend to install the Bicep extension in VS Code.
Ok, now that we have all the tooling in place, let’s focus on writing our Bicep file. Here is a simple example:
I will not go to through all the details but the most important settings are:
- name: name of the resource
- location: location of the resource
- provider: the provider that submitted the last deployment to the primary environment of the SWA
- repositoryUrl: URL for the repository of the SWA
- branch: the target branch in the repository
Certainly check out the other settings to see all the things you can tweak and configure.
Remark: This requires that all access rights are configured correctly at the Github repository level.
We can directly deploy our Azure Static Web App through the Azure CLI:
az deployment group create --name YourDeploymentName --resource-group YourResourceGroupName --mode Incremental --template-file astro.bicep
Or you can integrate it into your deployment pipeline.
Here is an example using Azure Devops:
And one using Github Actions:
More information
Bicep language for deploying Azure resources - Azure Resource Manager | Microsoft Learn
Microsoft.Web/staticSites - Bicep, ARM template & Terraform AzAPI reference | Microsoft Learn