Azure Fabricator Deployment

Scripts and instructions for deploying Fabricator with Azure App Service

Why do I need this?

Azure Web Service runs on Windows. In Windows, the maximum allowed length for a file path is 260 characters: npm@2, the version currently bundled with node, will nest all dependencies of dependencies in a folder structure that can easily blow past this limit. npm@3, currently in beta as of writing this, will install all dependencies and their dependencies in a flat structure, mitigating this issue.

Additionally, Azure Web Apps are designed to build and run node projects that start a server. The Fabricator project builds a static HTML site, so a few additional deployment and configuration tweaks are necessary to build and serve the static directory.

Instructions

On your system

1. If you're starting a new Fabricator project, follow the instructions in the Fabricator documention to create a new instance of Fabricator in your root project.

2. Copy the .deployment, deploy.sh, and .gitignore files from the files directory in this repo to the root directory of your Fabricator project. Some of the files are hidden files, so a simple way to do this is executing the following command from the root directory of this repo: cp -R files/. ../fabricator2/ (replace the second argument with the appropriate absolute or relative filepath, but keep the trailing slash). If you have an existing project with an existing .gitignore, instead of overriding it copy the lines from this version into your .gitignore.

3. Commit the changes to git, then merge into your desired deployment branch. You can optionally push to a remote repo such as GitHub.

In Azure

(Note: these instructions are based on the Azure Preview Portal)

1. In the Azure Portal, create a new Web App.

2. In your new Web App, go to Settings -> Application settings, find the section labeled App Settings and:

• change the value of WEBSITE_NODE_DEFAULT_VERSION to 4.1.0

• add the key-value pair SCM_COMMAND_IDLE_TIMEOUT: 500 (this prevents the deployment from timing out during the npm install)

3. In the same Application settings blade, find the section labeled Virtual applications and directories and change the value of the default Virtual directory / to site\wwwroot\dist

4. Go to Settings -> Continuous Deployment and add a Continuous Deployment. Follow the steps to link it to your git repo via GitHub, a local repo, or other applicable option.

5. If you've linked it to a remote repository such as GitHub, the build should start automatically. If you linked to a local git repository, you'll need to manually add your Azure Web App as a remote repo and push to it: instructions are here. When the build succeeds, you can view your new Fabricator instance by clicking "Browse" in the Azure Portal.

Other tips

• If you're deploying via a remote repository such as GitHub, you can view a stream of the build process output by enabling logging via Settings -> Diagnostic logs -> Application logging, and accessing the stream at Tools -> Log stream.
• If for some reason something has gone wrong and you think your node environment is borked, you can try again with a fresh environment by creating a Deployment Slot via Settings -> Deployment slots -> Add Slot. A deployment slot is just a new web app. Follow the instructions above, and if your build is successful, you can swap it with the primary VM via the top-level Swap action in your Web App's primary blade.