Donovan Brown

Infrastructure as Code is a DevOps practice that you can enable using Azure Resource Manager templates with Visual Studio Team Services.

There is a great resource on GitHub of quick start ARM templates.  However, I could not find one that showed me how to use ARM to provision a Web app with Java 8 and Tomcat 8 enabled. So, in this post I will show how using Visual Studio 2015 with Azure SDK 2.8.  To reduce any confusion, I am going to delete all optional resources.

We are going to begin by creating a new project in Visual Studio.

1. Start Visual Studio
2. From the File menu, select New > Project…
3. Select Azure Resource Group
   
4. Click OK
5. Select Web app
6. Click OK
7. From Solution Explorer, select WebSite.json
8. From the JSON Outline, delete the following resources:
   1. AutoScaleSettings
   2. ServerErrorsAlertRule
   3. ForbiddenRequestsAlertRule
   4. CPUHighAlertRule
   5. LongHttpQueueAlertRule
   6. AppInsightsComponent
9. Copy and paste the code below into WebSite.json under the Website properties
   

   "resources": [
      {
         "apiVersion": "2015-08-01",
         "name": "web",
         "type": "config",
         "dependsOn": [ "[concat('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('webSiteName'))]" ],
         "properties": {
            "javaVersion": "1.8",
            "javaContainer": "TOMCAT",
            "javaContainerVersion": "8.0"
         }
      }
   ]

10. From Solution Explorer, right-click your project
11. Select Deploy > New Deployment…
12. Select or create a new Resource group
13. Click Edit Parameters…

    Field Name	Value
    hostingPlanName	javahostingplan
    skuName	F1
    skuCapacity	1

14. Click Save
15. Click Deploy
16. You can monitor the status of your deployment from the Output window
    
17. Once complete, you will have a new Java enabled Web app
    

Visual Studio Team Services enables the use of this template in your DevOps pipeline via the Azure Resource Group Deployment task.