One of the easiest ways to publish your application to Azure App Service is straight from Visual Studio. While not an ideal solution long term or for any team over the size of one, it’s a great way for a solo developer to quickly get something up and running. Most of all, it doesn’t rely on any special configuration, scripts or external services.
Publish via Login
If the Azure account you are publishing to is the same one you use for your Visual Studio account or you have the username/password combination of the Azure account you are publishing to, you can publish direct from Visual Studio.
Inside solution explorer, right click your project and select “Publish”. You want to select “Azure App Service” on the next screen and “Select Existing”. The “Create New” option can be used if you don’t already have an App Service instance already (Rather than creating via the portal) – but we won’t do this this time around.
Click “Publish”. On the next screen you can select your Account, App Service and Deployment Slot to push to. Click “OK” and… that’s it. Really. You should see your project start building, publishing (via Web Deploy), and then Visual Studio will open your browser at the App Service URL.
Publish via Publish Profile
A publish profile is a settings file that holds all information for deploying your code direct to Visual Studio. The only real difference is that the publish profile can be given to you without you having any Azure login credentials yourself. Other than that, the actual deployment is largely the same.
To get a publish profile from the Azure Portal, head over to the dashboard of your App Service. Along the top you should see an option to “Get Publish Profile”.
With this file you are now able to deploy direct from Visual Studio. It’s important that this file is not just left lying around somewhere. With it, anyone can push code to your app service. So while it’s not quite the keys to the kingdom as much as a user/pass combination is, it’s pretty damn close.
Inside Solution Explorer, Right click your project, select Publish. Select “Import Profile” (You may have to scroll to the right to see this option).
Hit Publish! Immediately your project will build, publish and then open your browser at the App Service URL.
Obvious Issues
I touched on it earlier, but I feel the need to point it out further. Publishing from Visual Studio is not a long term strategy. Publishing from Visual Studio cuts out any CI/CD process you have running (If any), it creates possible inconsistencies with what you are deploying (Think “Did you get latest before you published?) and it creates a single point of failure of one developer doing all deployments in teams of more than 1.
That last point is important, while documentation can get some way around this, a single developer being the “release” guy usually creates some “magic” process where only that person can push code.
Again, with a single developer, especially when it’s just a hobby project, it’s less of an issue.
