Admittedly, the Function that we created last month didn't do a whole lot. We sent in a "name" and got a welcome message back. That's okay though as we have something that can be added to source control. If you haven't completed the exercise now would be a decent time to do so as we will be adding the "Hello World" function to source control and making some modifications, checking into source control and verifying that our changes were made.

Prerequisites

  • For this demo is the Function we created last month in either Visual Studio or VS Code
  • Additionally, you will need to have an account with one of the following Source Control options. Note: they all have free options

Source Control Options

  • Visual Studio Team Services
  • Local Git Repository
  • GitHub
  • BitBucket
  • Dropbox

Azure Functions gives the developer a wide range of options to choose from for their deployment options. In the past I have set up my Git repositories to use Visual Studio Team Services but it is just as easy to use something like GitHub so let's go that route!

If you are not yet familiar with Git-based source control solutions I would recommend that you take a look at this before continuing: Continuous Deployment For Azure Functions. It's a bit out of scope for this post to get into the workings of Git or it's tooling.

To dive into this, open the Azure Portal and click on the Resource Group containing your Function App. Then click on the name of your Function App and the first section you see should be the Overview section of the App itself:

Azure Function Overview

Select "Deployment Options" under Code Deployment and a new blade will appear called "Deployments." Click Setup and then you'll have another new blade appear where you can configure your source.

For this demo I selected GitHub, walked through the necessary authorization and then added some Performance Testing (this will simulate 20 users for approximately 5 minutes).

Once you are done with configuration the deployment will begin. The deployment itself is fairly quick and once it's done you'll get the following message:

Azure Function Successful Deployment

After we've deployed we can close the Deployments blade and we should be able to see our Functions. But wait, mine aren't showing up...

Azure Function Successful Deployment

Next we can send requests using Postman. I covered how to debug your Function last month using Postman and the steps are the same except you will use your local URL (the one we copied to the text editor) to send requests to.

What's Next?

So, now that we have our CI/CD working we can add a little complexity. If we open our run.csx file using Visual Studio Code (see this post if you forgot) we can make a simple edit to prove that everything is working right.

In Powershell I will do the following to open VS Code:

  
    code .\run.csx

Once VS Code opens we will make a similar change to line 20 in run.csx.

Update to line 20 in run.csx

  
    : req.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, "Hello " + name + " from Azure deployed from GitHub.");

Now, we're ready to make a commit from Powershell which will trigger another deployment.

  
    git add -A
    git commit -m "Update showing that when we make a change we will get an 
    updated message."
    git push origin master

It should take a minute or so and then your function will be updated. If you send in the same request you should now get back a different response.

Updated Function With New Message

Conclusion

Our webhook is still a bit basic but we are getting somewhere. We have the webhook hosted on Github and we are able to make changes, push them to source control and see the change immediately in our Function. Also, we can now work on the Functions in a team setting.

What's next:

Further Reading