Startup Stack Sample App

This repository demonstrates the Startup Stack – a set of infrastructure designed to get your app deployed in a robust, production-ready way with a minimum of fuss.

Deploying the Startup Stack Sample App

Fork this repository

Fork this repository into your own account (GitHub has more information about forking repos)

Clone the repository

Now clone this to your local machine or your Azure Cloud Shell. Here is how to do this from GitHub, or if you're using Visual Studio Code here are instructions.

Create a resource group and service principal

Either using Azure Cloud Shell or the Azure CLI on your local machine, first create a resource group to use for this project. Replace the values startupstack-demo and westus2 with a resource group name and location of your choosing.

az group create --name startupstack-demo --location westus2

Create a service principal for the deployment. This allows you to give permissions to GitHub Actions to deploy resources on your behalf, but only within the scope of the resource group you have created.

RESOURCE_GROUP_ID=$(az group show --name startupstack-demo --query id -o tsv)
az ad sp create-for-rbac --name startupstack-gh --role "Contributor" \
    --scope $RESOURCE_GROUP_ID --sdk-auth

The response will look something like the below JSON object. This response contains secrets which can be used to authenticate with Azure, so keep it secure for later steps.

{
"clientId": "...",
"clientSecret": "...",
"subscriptionId": "...",
"tenantId": "...",
...
}

After creating the service principal, we need to give it an additional role so our infrastructure template can assign roles within the scope of the resource group.

SP_ID=$(az ad sp list --display-name startupstack-gh --query [0].objectId -o tsv)
az role assignment create --assignee-object-id $SP_ID \
    --role "User Access Administrator" \
    --scope $RESOURCE_GROUP_ID \
    --assignee-principal-type "ServicePrincipal"

Deploy the initial infrastructure

Run the below commands to deploy, and don't forget to replace <DATABASE PASSWORD> with something more secure.

cd startup-stack-rails
az deployment group create --resource-group startupstack-demo \
    --template-file infrastructure/startup-stack.bicep \
    --parameters @infrastructure/params-production.json dbPassword="<DATABASE PASSWORD>" deploymentSpId=$SP_ID

Configure the Secrets

1. Navigate to your repository on GitHub
2. Select Settings > Secrets > New repository secret
3. Paste the entire JSON output that you saved earlier. Give the secret the name AZURE_CREDENTIALS.
4. Create another secret named AZURE_RG. Add the name of the resource group you created (in the above example it is startupstack-demo) to the secret's value field.
5. Create another secret named DB_PASSWORD. Add the database password you used when initially deploying the infrastructure to the secret's value field.

Run the action

1. Navigate to your repository on GitHub
2. Select Actions and choose Build and Deploy from the list
3. Click Run Workflow.

NB There will be a warning about workflows not being enabled on forked repository - you will need to enable workflows.

This will take about 10 minutes to complete on the first run. Subsequent runs will be faster due to caching of the Docker build.

Once the build has run successfully, you can find the URL of your freshly deployed site:

1. Click on the run which has completed
2. Select the deploy step
3. Disclose the logs from the Success! step. The log messages will include details of your deployed app:

Successfully deployed using the Startup Stack.
Webapp name: startup-stack-demovdwf5c-webapp
URL: https://startup-stack-demovdwf5c-app.azureedge.net
Connect to the app via ssh using this command:
az webapp ssh -n startup-stack-demovdwf5c-webapp -g <RESOURCE GROUP NAME>

Note: The CDN may take 10-15 minutes to initially propagate to all edge locations

Load the initial data

Locate the logs from running the action and within the Success find the command for connecting via ssh. Replace <RESOURCE GROUP NAME> with the name of the resource group you created and run the command in Azure Cloud Shell.

az webapp ssh -n startup-stack-demo -g <RESOURCE GROUP NAME>

Inside the ssh session which is established, setup the database.

cd /app
DISABLE_DATABASE_ENVIRONMENT_CHECK=1 bundle exec rails db:setup

Testing the app

You can navigate to the app using the included in the URL returned as part of the deployment logs. Select Login from the top navigation and log in with the email [email protected] and password foobar to use the demo application.

Clean Up

Once you are finished with testing the app, to avoid accruing costs you should clean up the infrastructure.

Run this command to remove the deployment group and all the resources in it:

az group delete -g <RESOURCE GROUP NAME>

About the Sample App

This sample app is built around the reference app from Michael Hart's Rails Tutorial. We chose it as it has real functionality but is simple enough not to be a distraction. You can read the original readme for more details about the app.

The core idea of the Startup Stack is that whatever stack you choose, so long as you can build it with a Dockerfile, then it can be deployed successfully in a robust, production-ready way with the Startup Stack.