Deploying .NET 5 Web App via GitHub Actions to Azure App Service

.NET 5 is released recently and now you can develop applications using .NET. While releasing .NET five with zero delays Azure App Services started supporting .NET 5 with Early Access. This is helping us to deploy our application code, without having to deply them as self-contained with framework. Meaning we can now deploy our .NET 5 Web Apps, APIs or Function Apps to Azure, just as published project binaries and things will start to run without any issues. In this post let’s look at how we can setup a quick build deployment pipeline deploying a .NET 5 web application to Azure using GitHub Actions.

You can create .NET 5 Early Access enabled app service app in Azure using the Azure portal or by utilizing the latest version of Azure CLI (2.15.1) as described here. In the portal you are allowed to select the runtime as .NET 5 as shown below.

Using CLI to create .NET 5 Web App is explained in the post here.

Once you have created the app service app in Azure you can download the publish profile and copy it is content and store it as a secret in GitHub secrets.

To create the .NET 5 web app you can use below command and then commit the code to the GitHub repo.

dotnet new webapp -f net5.0 --name mynet5app

Let’s create a simple GitHub Action workflow which can build publish and deploy the .NET 5 web app to Azure.

For this demo the trigger for the workflow is set as workflow_dispatch letting it to be triggered manually.

on: [workflow_dispatch]

name: Net5BuildDeployGitHubHostedWindowsRunner

Then the job is setup to build and deploy and the Windows latest GitHub hosted runner is used for the job.

jobs:

  build-and-deploy:

    runs-on: windows-latest

First step is to checkout the repo.

    steps:

    - uses: actions/checkout@master

Then the .NET SDK should be set to use the latest .NET 5 SDK. Information on available SDKs can be found here.

    - name: Set up .NET Core

      uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1

      with:

        dotnet-version: '5.0.100'

Next, we can build the web app using dotnet build command.

    - name: Build with dotnet

      run: dotnet build  .\mynet5app\mynet5app.csproj --configuration Release

As the next step, we have to publish the built project. env.DOTNET_ROOT here is referring .Net run time location. You can see more information here.

    - name: dotnet publish

      run: dotnet publish .\mynet5app\mynet5app.csproj -c Release -o ${{env.DOTNET_ROOT}}/myapp --no-build --no-restore

The published .NET 5 project then can be deployed to Azure with webapps-deploy action.

    - name: Deploy to Azure Web App

      uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v1

      with:

        app-name: 'app-githubact-demo'

        slot-name: 'production'

        publish-profile: ${{ secrets.MYNET5WEBAPPPUBLISHPROFILE }}

        package: ${{env.DOTNET_ROOT}}/myapp 

The full workflow implementation as below.

on: [workflow_dispatch]

name: Net5BuildDeployGitHubHostedWindowsRunner

jobs:

  build-and-deploy:

    runs-on: windows-latest

    steps:

    - uses: actions/checkout@master

    - name: Set up .NET Core

      uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1

      with:

        dotnet-version: '5.0.100'

    - name: Build with dotnet

      run: dotnet build  .\mynet5app\mynet5app.csproj --configuration Release

    - name: dotnet publish

      run: dotnet publish .\mynet5app\mynet5app.csproj -c Release -o ${{env.DOTNET_ROOT}}/myapp --no-build --no-restore

    - name: Deploy to Azure Web App

      uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v1

      with:

        app-name: 'app-githubact-demo'

        slot-name: 'production'

        publish-profile: ${{ secrets.MYNET5WEBAPPPUBLISHPROFILE }}

        package: ${{env.DOTNET_ROOT}}/myapp