Deploy To Production

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 





Continuous Delivery Options

When launching anything into production, it's essential to eliminate any uncertain elements. This is where Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD) become relevant. GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps (or Azure Pipelines) are two Microsoft options for implementing CI/CD. There are numerous other alternatives, such as Jenkins, TeamCity, and GitLab - the options are extensive. If our current CI/CD solution is compatible with deploying ASP.NET, it will also be capable of managing Blazor since Blazor essentially functions as an ASP.NET application.

We should ensure that we establish tests as a component of our CI/CD pipeline. The great aspect is that there is no requirement for additional hardware to test our components, it will function as long as our CI/CD pipeline can execute unit tests (nUnit, xUnit).

We can execute all builds and tests whenever a pull request is made. If both the build and tests are successful, a team member conducts a code review and gives their approval for the change. Once approved by the team member, this initiates a release that deploys the site to our testing environment. Our testers will go through the testing protocols and give their approval for the changes. At the end of the sprint, the tester will complete the full testing protocol and approve the site. We then initiate another release that deploys the site to production.

Deploying The Database

When it comes to deploying our database, Entity Framework takes care of much for us. It generates code to both apply and undo changes, so it should be relatively secure to allow it to operate autonomously. There is an alternative, which is allowing Entity Framework to create SQL scripts that we can execute manually.

By adding the script flag, we will get a SQL script we can run against our database-

dotnet ef migrations script 20180904195021_InitialCreate

There are many different databases we can use, such as Microsoft SQL, MySQL, and, SQLite. We could also go for a non-relational type of database. Blazor supports it all, so whatever is right for the project is what we should use.

Hosting Options

When it comes to deploying Blazor applications, there are numerous choices available. Any cloud platform capable of hosting ASP.NET Core applications should have no issues running Blazor.

Hosting Blazor Server

If the cloud provider offers the ability to turn WebSockets on or off, we should turn them on because that is the protocol utilized by SignalR. Based on the traffic, we may consider utilizing a service like Azure SignalR Service, which will manage all connections and allow our application to accommodate a larger number of users.

In certain situations, the cloud provider might offer support for .NET Core 3.x, yet not provide built-in support for .NET 5. However, by publishing our application in self-contained deployment mode, we ensure that all files needed to run the project are included (this might vary across different hosting providers). Additionally, this approach is beneficial to guarantee that we are operating on the specific framework version that we anticipate.

Hosting Blazor WebAssembly

When utilizing a .NET Core backend (as we do for the blog), we are hosting a .NET Core application, meaning the same principles apply as with hosting a Blazor Server. There are some other considerations when it comes to hosting Blazor WebAssembly, such as these:

  • We may need a .NET Core backend.
  • The data we are getting may be static or hosted somewhere else.

In either of these cases, we can host our application in Azure Static Websites or even GitHub Pages.

Hosting On IIS

We can additionally deploy our application using Internet Information Server (IIS). By installing the hosting bundle, you will ensure that the ASP.NET Core IIS module is included, provided that IIS is installed on the machine. Remember to activate the WebSocket protocol on the server.

Conclusion

Deploying is perhaps the most important step when it comes to an application. Without deploying our application, it's just code. With the things we mentioned above, such as CI/CD, hosting, and deployment, we can easily deploy the code.

































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