Tag: Azure

Alexa, Tell Azure Logic Apps to Post a Message to Slack

Alexa is Amazon’s voice-controlled personal assistant. It’s super convenient and so you might want to create your own skills as well. You’ll be surprised how easy this is can be with the help of Microsoft Azure Logic Apps.

Here’s our sample project: Let’s say you share a family Slack with your spouse and children. Whenever food is ready or the rabbits need to be fed, you want to send a Slack message to your children. This should be as easy as saying:

Alexa, tell my children: food is ready.
Alexa, tell my children to feed the bunnies.

We’ll do all of this with zero lines of code, in less than 15 minutes. Ready, set, go!

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Push Your ASP.NET Core 2.0 App to Azure Container Registry via Bitbucket Pipelines

Bitbucket is a quite popular cloud-hosted source code repository. It has a free plan which includes unlimited private Git or Mercurial repositories for up to five team members and even 50 build minutes per month. Bitbucket Pipelines is its integrated Continuous Integration tool, comparable to Travis or AppVeyor: A repository can be configured to run a certain script after each commit. For example, to check if the build passes—or to build a Docker container of your ASP.NET Core 2.0 app which is automatically pushed to Azure Container Registry (ACR), from where you can deploy your container to Azure App Services or robust Kubernetes clusters. In this blog post, I will explain how to set up Bitbucket Pipelines, build your ASP.NET Core 2.0 app (checked in to a BitBucket Git repository), package it as a Docker container and push it to your Azure Container Registry.

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Auto-Deploying to Azure App Services from GitLab

GitLab is no default deployment source
GitLab is no default deployment source

One of our customers at Thinktecture recently wanted to set up an auto deployment of its GitLab repository to an App Service hosted by Microsoft Azure. If you want to set up auto deployments for GitLab, you might be disappointed because this service is not included in the list of available services. Setting up auto deploy from GitLab.com or on-premises editions of GitLab is a manual process—luckily, it’s an easy one.

GitLab.com is a very popular service, as it allows free private Git repositories with up to ten gigabytes in size. If this still doesn’t suit your needs or you want to host the software yourself, GitLab also offers on-premises editions (Community Edition, free and Enterprise Edition, paid per user and year).

Microsoft Azure is a popular cloud service, offering so-called App Services (free plans available). App Services are used for hosting web apps or back-ends based on .NET, Node.js, Java, PHP and other technologies. An App Service can be set up to auto deploy changes that are pushed to a certain branch of a Git repository.

Here’s how to do it for GitLab.com or on-premises editions of GitLab:

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