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Working With Azure Web App Using Azure PowerShell

Introduction

This article demonstrates what Azure Web App is,  and how to create Azure Web apps with the help of Azure PowerShell.

What is Azure Web App?

A web app is a computing resource in Azure which is fully optimized for hosting web sites or web applications. This is part of App Services which is Platform as Service (PaaS), which is an offering of Microsoft Azure. App Services includes Web and mobile capabilities. It also includes new capabilities to automate business processes and host Cloud APIs.

As mentioned above, the Web app is required to compute resources in Azure, which may be on shared or dedicated VMs, as it depends upon the pricing tier you choose. Your application code deployed in the web app runs in a managed VM, which is isolated from other customers.

There are various benefits of using Azure app Service like

  • Support for multiple languages and frameworks.
  • DevOps Optimization, where continuous deployment and integration can be performed.
  • High availability.
  • Scalability.
  • Integration with other SaaS Platforms.
  • Security and Compliance.
  • Application templates.
  • Visual Studio Integration.

Pre-requisite

Before starting to work with Azure web app with PowerShell, we need to make sure we have the necessary pre-requisites. You need to install Azure PowerShell on your machine. I have explained in detail in my other article, Creating Azure Resource Group With PowerShell. This article also explains about Resource Group which is a logical group of Azure resources and how it helps to group the resources. Before going to next step in this article, perform the steps given below mentioned in the article shown above.

  • Login to Azure account.
  • Select the appropriate subscription.
  • Create a resource group, if it does not already exist.

Create Azure Web app

Once you have a target resource group, select a resource group, as shown below in a variable.

  1. $resourceGroup = Get-AzureRmResourceGroup -Name <ResourceGroupName>  

You can validate the value of $resourceGroup variable by entering the variable name on the PowerShell Prompt.


To create a new web app in the selected resource group, use New-AzureRmWebApp cmdlet. This cmdlet takes ResourceGroupName, name and location required parameters. Location attribute decides where the new Web app will geologically reside.

  1. New-AzureRmWebApp -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName -Name "WebAppPowerShellDemo" -Location "eastus"  

In the command given above, we passed resource group name, which we captured in $resourceGroup variable. If the Web app with specified name (in our case, it is WebAppPowerShellDemo) is available, the Web app is created in Azure and displays newly created Web app details.




Note the Type property of the newly created web app. It is “Microsoft.Web/sites”. Every resource in Azure has a specific type and these types are used, while creating such resources with help of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template, which we will cover in some other article about how to use ARM template to create the Web app.

Get Target Web App

To get the existing Web app from Azure, use Get-AzureRmWebApp cmdlet. It again takes ResourceGroupName and Name, which are the required parameters.

  1. Get-AzureRmWebApp -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName -Name "WebAppPowerShellDemo"  

To get all the Web apps within a resource group, you just pass ResourceGroupName parameter to cmdlet given above.

  1. Get-AzureRmWebApp -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName  

To get all the Web apps within your subscription, don’t pass any parameter to cmdlet given above.

  1. Get-AzureRmWebApp  

Update Existing Web App Settings

You can update  certain settings of the existing Web app, using Set-AzureRmWebApp cmdlet with ResourceGroupName and Name required parameters along with other optional parameters.

The cmdlet updates app settings value of the target Web Application.

  1. $appSetting = @{"KeyVault:VaultUri" = "https://localhost:8080"; "KeyVault:Thumbprint" = "194B3923skuwe2"}  
  2.   
  3. Set-AzureRmWebApp -Name "WebAppPowerShellDemo" -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName -AppSettings $appSetting  

Summary

In this article, I discussed about what Azure Web app is, and what are the benefits of using Azure Web app. Subsequently, we discussed about how to create a new web app with PowerShell, retrieve target web apps, get all web apps from the particular resource group and get all the web apps from your subscription. We also looked at how to update an existing web app configuration for certain settings.


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