One of my customers wanted to deploy an Angular application to Azure App Service. Azure DevOps was already used in another project so it was obvious to use it for this new one.

Install NodeJS

I work on MacOS so homebrew can help to install packages. If you are on Windows or Linux, you can find the last files to install there.

On MacOS when homebrew is already installed, you just have to run the command:

brew install node

Install Angular CLI

Once node installed, you can get the last Angular CLI. This utility can help in various tasks. One of them is to create new Angular projects from scratch.
To install Angular CLI globally, you can use this command:

npm install -g @angular/cli

The CLI will be available anywhere on your system.

Create a new Angular project

We can now create a new Angular project. The command is very simple :

ng new HelloWorld --strict false --routing false --style css

This command will create a new project called HelloWorld with default settings. It can take a little of time because of the number of modules to add.

Testing the application

Go in the folder of the project

cd HelloWorld

You can try the application using the command:

ng serve

This command will generate the application and create a node server on port 4200. Just launch your browser at http://localhost:4200/ to see the default page.

You can use Control C in the terminal to exit.

Create the Azure Pipeline

Congratulations, our application is ready to be deployed! It's time to add the CI/CD part.

I will not explain how to create an Azure DevOps project here. It's very simple and if you have doubts, you can read the documentation.

We have now to create a new pipeline.
The first part is building the application

- stage: Build
  displayName: Build stage
  jobs:
  - job: BuildJob
    pool:
      vmImage: 'ubuntu-20.04'
    steps:
      - task: NodeTool@0
        inputs:
          versionSpec: '10.x'
        displayName: 'Install Node.js'

      - script: |
          cd '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/HelloWorld'
          npm install -g @angular/cli
          npm install
          ng build --prod
        displayName: 'npm install and build'
      - task: ArchiveFiles@2
        displayName: 'Archive files'
        inputs:
          rootFolderOrFile: '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/HelloWorld/dist/HelloWorld/'
          includeRootFolder: false
          archiveType: zip
          archiveFile: $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)/$(Build.BuildId).zip
          replaceExistingArchive: true

      - task: PublishBuildArtifacts@1
        inputs:
          PathtoPublish: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)/$(Build.BuildId).zip'
          ArtifactName: 'drop'
          publishLocation: 'Container'

The code is pretty simple:

1. We install node on the agent
2. We install the Angular CLI
3. We install the NPM packages
4. We build the Angular application
5. We zip the files
6. We publish the zip as artifact

The second part is deploying the application:

- stage: Deploy
  displayName: 'Deploy Web App'
  dependsOn: Build
  condition: succeeded()
  jobs:
  - deployment: DeploymentJob
    pool:
      vmImage: 'ubuntu-20.04'
    environment: $(environmentName)
    strategy:
      runOnce:
        deploy:
          steps:

          - task: AzureWebApp@1
            displayName: 'Deploy Azure Web App : $(webAppName)'
            inputs:
              azureSubscription: $(azureSubscription)
              appName: $(webAppName)
              appType: webAppLinux
              package: $(Pipeline.Workspace)/drop/$(Build.BuildId).zip 

In this stage, we only have on action. We get the artifact as zip file and we publish it to Azure App Service with the zip deploy task.

Complete code

The complete code of the project is hosted on GitHub. If you are only interested by the code of the Azure Pipeline, you can read it there.