Custom deployment steps for an Azure App Service

I’ve just started setting up some continuous deployment for my personal websites. All of the sites are hosted within Azure App Services and the sources are located on either GitHub or BitBucket. By having the source code located on a public accessible repository (be it private or public), it’s rather easy to connect Azure to these locations. On my day-job I come across a lot of web- and desktop applications which also need continuous integration and deployment steps in order for them to go live. Read more →

Deleting NPM folders when path is too long

When doing modern web development you will probably have to start using NPM sooner, rather than later. Not a big deal of course, since it’s a great addition to the frontend development environment. However, most NPM packages have quite a bit of dependencies to other packages. All of these dependencies get pulled towards your system also. Still not a big problem as you want a working solution. The problem arises when you are on a Windows environment, there are a lot of dependencies and you want to delete a project folder on your system. Read more →

Change the password policy of your Azure AD accounts

For our automated deployments we have several Azure Organizational accounts in place. These are created within the Azure Active Directory. Because these accounts are meant for services, we don’t want them to inherit the default password policy for renewing their passwords every X days. Lucky for us, you can configure this via PowerShell. A short how-to is written on MSDN. The thing that isn’t written (or referenced) over there is how to run the MSOL cmdlets. Read more →

Different Azure PowerShell modules for managing single resources or groups

While creating the PowerShell scripts for automatic deployment of the project’s Azure environment I discovered there are multiple Azure PowerShell modules. When you want to manage a single resource, such as storage accounts, websites, databases, virtual machines, and media services, you need the (default) Azure module. However, when you need to manage resource groups, you will need the AzureResourceManager module. This is useful information if you want to deploy new Azure websites with a specific hosting plan, like Basic or Standard. Read more →

Adding Azure service bus queues via PowerShell

There are quite a couple of Azure cmdlets made available by Microsoft. All of this sweetness can be installed on your system via the Web Platform Installer. After installing these modules you can start managing your Azure subscription in PowerShell scripts. Most of the stuff for managing your Azure subscription is implemented in these Azure cmdlets. One of the things which isn’t implemented (yet) is managing the Service Busses in your subscription. Read more →