Boilerplate for Bottle on Azure with Continuous Deployment

About

This repository contains a sample bottle application for Azure Web Apps, which automatically deploys a new version as soon as the corresponding GitHub repository is updated (a.k.a. continuous deployment, see also Azure App Service).

The code is based on the Bottle template in the Azure Marketplace as described on this Azure documentation page (2015-06-24).

Update : see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service-web/web-sites-python-create-deploy-bottle-app

Usage

Three steps to start from scratch:

1. Create your project and run the Web App locally
2. Add the project to GitHub
3. Connect your GitHub project to an Azure Web App

Create your project and run locally

The easiest way to get started is download the current ZIP file at https://github.com/ernstbaslerpartner/bottle-azure-boilerplate/archive/master.zip. Unzip the file, rename the folder to mynewprojectname.

In order to develop and test the Web App on your machine, you need to create a virtual environment for your Python project and install the necessary requirements, see also Azure documentation page for details. Sounds scary, but it is done within a couple of seconds. Then you can run the site locally.

Here is a summary of the necessary steps (for Windows):

# Get the code
wget https://github.com/ernstbaslerpartner/bottle-azure-boilerplate/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
mv bottle-azure-boilerplate-master mynewprojectname
cd mynewprojectname

# Create virtual environment and run the site locally 
python -m virtualenv env
env\Scripts\pip install -r requirements.txt # for Unix, change slashes accordingly
env\Scripts\python app.py --debug           # for Unix, change slashes accordingly

The development server now runs on http://localhost:5555/.

At this point, you may want to edit the source code and this Readme file.

Add the project to GitHub

If you have one the Github desktop clients (Mac or Win) installed, just drag-n-drop the folder to the desktop client. The folder is now locally registered as a git repository. You then have to publish the repository to GitHub by clicking on the "Publish" button.

Alternatively, you can add the folder to Github with the command line.

Create an Azure Web App and connect it to your GitHub project

Now you are 5 easy steps away from your live website:

1. Log into Azure Portal and create a "Web App". Wait until the app is available, which may take a couple of seconds.
2. Click on the created Web App and then click the tile "Deployment".
3. Click on "Choose Source" and then "Github".
4. Authorize Azure to access your GitHub account.
5. Choose the repository. Wait until the initial version is deployed.

Now, as soon as you push a change to your GitHub repository, the change will be deployed automatically to the Azure site.

A demo site can be found at http://bottle-azure-boilerplate.azurewebsites.net/ (this site may take a second to load as it runs on a free plan).

App Settings

If you have configuration settings such as API keys, you don't want to put them in your GitHub repository. Instead, define an "App Setting" variable MY_CONFIG in your Azure Web App, see also this video on application settings. In the code, we assume that the value of the app setting is a JSON string.

Webjobs

An Azure Web App can also have background webjobs.

You can initialize a webjob called process_queueas follows (assuming Windows shell and Azure CLI installed):

> cd App_Data\jobs\triggered\process_queue\
> zip run.zip run.py
> azure site job upload process_queue triggered run.zip sbbdelaybot
info:    Executing command site job upload
+ Getting locations
+ Getting sites
+ Getting site information
+ Uploading new WebJob
+ Getting WebJob
info:    WebJob process_queue has been uploaded
info:    site job upload command OK

You can also create your webjob manually on Azure Portal.

After this one-time initialization, any changes to run.py will be automatically deployed as soon as you commit your changes to GitHub.

Please note: A triggered webjob apparently needs a Web-App with standard tier and configured to be "Always On".

Changes to the original code

There was one problem with the original code from the Marketplace: static files were not served on Azure, only on the development server. I suspect there is a problem with web.config (in my case for 2.7). However, I could not figure out the problem, see my comment here. As a quick fix, I moved the static file handler to route.py.

Author

• original code by the PTVS team (source code repository unknown)
• changes by Stephan Heuel, @ping13