Deploy .NET Core app to Azure Web App with ARM template and GitHub Actions

Question

I'm pretty familiar with Azure DevOps, pipelines all that stuff, and now I'm trying to dig into GitHub Actions. The question is basically pretty simple, I want to deploy my .NET Core 5 App to Azure. The only problem is, that all examples include this publish profile.

Since I provision the infrastructure with an ARM template, the publish profile is simply not there yet. I could find some examples that deploy the ARM template and a couple of examples that deploy the Web App, but no example combining both. Maybe I'm a little bit polluted by the way Azure DevOps works and the (wonderful) idea of service connections.

So my question is, how do I publish a web app to Azure when I don't have the ability to download a publish profile and store that in my GitHub secrets, using GitHub Actions?

Answer 1

OK, I found this one out myself. Apparently there's an action you can use that will download the publish profile for you. This means that you don't have to have the publish profile up front. The step looks like this:

- name: Get WebApp/FunctionApp publish profile
  id: webapp-dev
  uses: aliencube/publish-profile-actions@v1
  env:
    AZURE_CREDENTIALS: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}
  with:
    resourceGroupName: 'your-resource-group-name'
    appName: 'your-app-name'

This leaves you with an output variable called `profile' which can be used in following steps like so:

- name: 'Run Azure webapp deploy action using publish profile credentials'
  uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v1
  with: 
    app-name: 'your-app-name'
    publish-profile: ${{ steps.webapp-dev.outputs.profile }}
    package: './'

This means you can now provision resources using ARM templates, get the publish profile (just-in-time) and use that to deploy your system... Everybody happy...