Deploying Go applications to App Service Linux with GitHub Actions

7 minute read | By Anthony Salemo

This post will cover deploying Go applications to Azure App Service Linux with Go “Blessed” images using GitHub Actions.

Overview

Note: Go “Blessed Images” are currently marked as experimental - these images and behavior on App Service are subject to change. This is also not recommended for production.

Prerequisites

Application Logs

IMPORTANT: Ensure that App Service Logs are enabled - review this document on how to do so.

This is important incase the application crashes due to misconfiguration of any of these profilers - given this is all at the application level, we need these logs enabled to see what may have gone wrong. You can view logging in a few ways:

  • Diagnose and Solve Problems -> Application Logs
  • Log Stream
  • Directly through the Kudu site - such as the /newui endpoint (https://sitename.scm.azurewebsites.net/newui) or the normal Kudu site
  • An FTP client to view logfiles under /home/LogFiles

GitHub repository

To enable CI/CD with GitHub Actions, you must have a GitHub account and a GitHub repository for your source code created.

Quickstart

Go “Blessed Images” expose port 8080 - which Go application HTTP servers should be listening on. For example:

err := http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)

You can however change this with the PORT App Setting - the HTTP listening port in the application would need to be updated.

If you wanted to listen for PORT, you could do the following:

port := ":" + os.Getenv("PORT")
log.Fatal(app.Listen(port))

See: Default exposed ports of Azure App Service Linux Blessed Images

For this example, we’re going to be using the Fiber example from here azureossd - go-devops-examples. You can bring your own code as well.

Local development

We can quickly get started with a Go project using Fiber with the following:

  1. Create a main.go file
  2. Create a go.mod file by running go mod init yourmodulename
  3. Install Fiber with go get github.com/gofiber/fiber/v2
  4. In the main.go file, add the following:
package main

import (
    "log"

    "github.com/gofiber/fiber/v2"
)

func main() {
    app := fiber.New()

    app.Get("/", func (c *fiber.Ctx) error {
        return c.SendString("Hello, World - From Fiber!")
    })

  log.Fatal(app.Listen(":8080"))
}
  1. Run the application with go run ., you should now see the below in your terminal:
$ go run .

 ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
 │                   Fiber v2.48.0                   │
 │               http://127.0.0.1:8080               │
 │       (bound on host 0.0.0.0 and port 8080)       │
 │ Handlers ............. 2  Processes ........... 1 │
 │ Prefork ....... Disabled  PID ............. 24812 │
 └───────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
  1. You should now be able to access the application over localhost:8080

Create an App Service

Follow this documentation on creating a Go 1.19 App Service on Linux - Deploy a Go web app to Azure App Service

Enable GitHub Actions (Manual creation)

Deploy with a Publish Profile

You can deploy to App Service Linux by using a Publish Profile

  1. Go to the Azure Portal for your application and navigate to Deployment Center. Download the Publish Profile by selecting “Manage publish profile” and then “Download publish profile”.

Download publish profile

  1. Go to the GitHub repository being used for this code and select Settings -> Actions -> Secrets and Variables.
  2. Click on New Repository Secret - add a variable named AZUREAPPSERVICE_PUBLISHPROFILE

Repository secret

  1. Copy the entire contents within the Publish Profile .xml tha was downloaded and add it as the value to the AZUREAPPSERVICE_PUBLISHPROFILE secret on the GitHub side.

  2. Next, on the GitHub side - under Actions - select New Workflow.

NOTE: If desired, you can instead manually create a path of .github/workflows/somework.yaml in the root of your project - this will kick off a workflow run when commited to your repository

  1. Add the following file to your new workflow - replace the App Service name where needed:
name: Go

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3

    - name: Set up Go
      uses: actions/setup-go@v3
      with:
        # Change your go version as needed
        go-version: 1.19

    - name: Build
      run: go build -v ./...

    - name: Upload artifact for deployment jobs
      uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
      with:
        name: go-app
        path: |
          .
          
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: build
    environment:
      name: 'Production'
      url: ${{ steps.deploy-to-webapp.outputs.webapp-url }} 
      
    steps:
      - name: Download artifact from build job
        uses: actions/download-artifact@v2
        with:
          name: go-app
          path: .

      - name: 'Deploy to Azure Web App'
        uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v2
        id: deploy-to-webapp
        with:
          app-name: 'yourapp'
          slot-name: 'Production'
          publish-profile: ${{ secrets.AZUREAPPSERVICE_PUBLISHPROFILE }}

What does the above file do?:

  • It runs go build to build the binary
  • It uses actions/upload-artifact@v2 to upload the binary to the “deploy” stage
  • It downloads the actions/download-artifact@v2 binary with the alias “go-app”
  • It then deploys the binary to the App Service

Deploy with a Service Principal

  1. Generate a Service Principal by following the documentation here - Generate deployment credentials. Save the JSON output for the next step.

  2. Following the section above on how to add GitHub Action Secrets, add a secret named AZURE_CREDENTIALS with the output from the credential creation in step 1.

  3. Use the following .yaml, below is a complete example - the only major change we do in this one is to remove the publish-profile property from the azure/webapps-deploy@v2 task and add the azure/login@v1 task as a replacement for authentication.

name: Go

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3

    - name: Set up Go
      uses: actions/setup-go@v3
      with:
        # Change your go version as needed
        go-version: 1.19

    - name: Build
      run: go build -v ./...

    - name: Upload artifact for deployment jobs
      uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
      with:
        name: go-app
        path: |
          .
          
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: build
    environment:
      name: 'Production'
      url: ${{ steps.deploy-to-webapp.outputs.webapp-url }} 
      
    steps:
      - name: Download artifact from build job
        uses: actions/download-artifact@v2
        with:
          name: go-app
          path: .

      - uses: azure/login@v1
        with:
          creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}

      - name: 'Deploy to Azure Web App'
        uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v2
        id: deploy-to-webapp
        with:
          app-name: 'some-app'
          slot-name: 'Production'

      - name: logout
        run: |
          az logout

Enable GitHub Actions (Azure Portal)

At this current time while in expiremental status, using the Azure Portal to set up GitHub Actions and commit a workflow file does not work for Go “Blessed” images. It will not create a GitHub Actions workflow (thus not committing to it the repository to kick off a workflow run).

Important notes

In the go build section, we don’t specify anything like -o, for any named execuable output.

This is because, at the current time, SCM_DO_BUILD_DURING_DEPLOYMENT is not honored on Go “Blessed” images. oryxBuilder will always be the builder used.

The executable is built by Oryx - and named oryxBuildBinary and placed in /home/site/wwwroot.

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