Table of Contents

Deployment

We tested five different deployment methods and chose Azure Web Apps IIS ASP.NET 4.8.

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is a static site hosting service that takes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files directly from a repository on GitHub, optionally processes the files through a build process, and publishes a website. It is an excellent way to host a website for free and serves as an effective method for testing a website before deploying it to a paid hosting service.

We use GitHub Pages to test our website. Any content pushed to the staging branch of the stride-website repository is automatically deployed to the gh-pages branch, from which GitHub Pages builds and publishes the website.

To manage the build and deployment process, we use the GitHub action stride-web-staging-github.yml. This action is triggered when:

  1. A push is made to the staging branch
  2. The action is manually triggered

You can manually trigger the action by navigating to the Actions tab and clicking the Run workflow button.

The gh-pages branch is a special branch used by GitHub Pages to host the website and should not be edited directly. Any changes made to the gh-pages branch will be overwritten by the subsequent staging branch deployment.

The GitHub action stride-web-staging-github.yml works as follows:

  1. The action is triggered when:
    • A push is made to the staging branch
    • The action is manually triggered
  2. paths-ignore is used to ignore specific changes to the staging branch
    • Current exclusions: README.md, wiki/**, .github/**
  3. The remaining steps in the action are self-explanatory

Azure Web Apps

Deploying with .NET Framework

The .NET Framework uses IIS to host the website, which serves any static files.

The web.config file is used to configure IIS, including:

  • Mime types for static files
  • Redirects
  • Gzip compression
  • Static file caching
  • Custom Headers
  • Custom 404

The GitHub action stride-website-staging-azure builds the website and deploys it to Azure Web Apps.

Step-by-Step Deployment Guide for Azure Web Apps (Windows) with IIS and Stride Website.

Recommendation

  1. ASP.NET 4.8 with IIS for Staging
  2. ASP.NET 4.8 with IIS for Release
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