Move a WordPress Site to Azure App Service

July 16, 2020July 16, 2020 / Nr

Here is how to move a simple WordPress blog to Azure Web App Service. This method is not the simplest but it works well enough and is pretty clean.

Backup

Export the database with a tool such as phpMyAdmin. Then zip up all the files from the wp-content folder.

Or you could use a commercial plugin to to the backup and restore. I don’t like the ones I’ve tried and the manual way is fairly simple.

Create Web App in Azure

In Azure portal, Create a New Resource
Search for “WordPress” then create

Next, fill out the forms with values that make sense, although a few things to pay attention to are:

Database Provider

If your web site gets very little traffic, then choosing “MySQL In App” is reasonable and it’ll save money; About $250/month. The main limitation with this option is the site cannot scale out to handle sudden, heavy loads. However, you can “scale up” the service tier which may help.

App Service Plan

Choose the app service that’s right for you. In this example, we picked the lowest price tier and expect it’ll be upgraded later after some testing.

Keep in mind you can reasonably add up to 5 or so websites within a production tier service plan if they are low traffic and not resource needy.

Configure WordPress

After the deployment, go to the resource overview page and copy the site’s URL.

Follow URL to the WordPress setup page and do the initial setup.

Fill out the form to initialize WordPress then login to the fresh site. The username and such isn’t needed beyond getting logged in for the first time because in the next steps the whole site is restored from backup.

Restore from the backup

How to do this part depends on what method used to backup the website. If you are using a plugin then install it and follow its instructions.

Manual restore

Manual restore is basically two steps:

Import the database using the phpMyAdmin tool
Upload the wp-content folder contents to the website

Import database – Click on “MySQL in App” on the left-side menu then find “Manage” to use the phpMyAdmin tool. Use phpMyAdmin to drop the existing database tables then import your site’s database.

Upload Files – First you need the login credentials. Look in Deployment Center -> “Deployment Credentials” to get what you need to connect to the document root of the web app, using SFTP.

Using your favorite SFTP application, connect to the website and upload your wp-content folder. I recommend zipping up the wp-content folder and upload that. Then connect using the console to unzip the file.

Console/Terminal – Click on “Console” in the left-side menu to use command line tools such as Zip, Gzip, Tar, etc.

Finish up

After the import is successful, login with an account from your restored website and do:

Go to Settings -> Permalinks and click the Save button to rebuild them.
Edit the wp-config file “Authentication Unique Keys and Salts” and perhaps other settings to reflect what you had before. Do Not replace the wp-config file outright because it is specifically configured to work with Azure.
Back in the Deployment Center, disconnect from the gitHub repository; You don’t need it anymore.

Extras

For the most part, the site is ready to use and it’s a good idea to review everything is working now.

Fix URLs

Install “Better Search Replace” plugin to change your website URLs if needed. Usually this is because your domain name had to change. For example, “n390.com” moved to “n390.com”.

Add a custom domain name

After the content is imported you can browse the App Service URL and everything should be as it should. However, the hostname is using YOURWEBSITE.azurewebsites.net domain name.

On your Azure Web App blade’s left-side menu go to Custom Domain and click on “Add a custom domain”. Follow the instructions to validate ownership then it should be good-to-go.

Add TLS/SSL

Good news! SSL is available in Azure. But, if you want to add one to your custom domain, then you gotta upgrade to at least the Basic Plan.

Click on TLS/SSL settings in the left-side menu then look in “Private Key Certificates” to create your own. Follow these instructions for complete details.

Add a Data Disk to an Azure Linux Virtual Machine

May 11, 2020June 2, 2020 / Nr

Steps in Brief

Audit the disks currently attached
Create a new data disk
Attach the disk to the virtual machine
Prepare the new disk
Mount the disk
Fix so it automatically mounts

Audit the disks currently attached

Before adding a new disk, it’s a good idea to see what is there now. This will make finding the new disk much easier. SSH in to the VM and run the command sudo fdisk -l

Create a new data disk

The data disk you create can be independent of the virtual machine. This means it could be created separately and used on any VM. Think of this step like going to the store and buying a new, blank hard disk drive. We’ll attach it to the VM later.

There are several ways to create a disk but in this exercise, let’s use the Azure portal to create a data disk on its own. Click on “Create a resource” in the Azure portal and search for “Managed Disks”.

Platform managed encryption is the default and works fine for most cases. Encryption “at rest” means the data that is written to the physical disk in Azure’s data centers is encrypted. It is decrypted to put into memory as a virtual disk for your VM but the actual, physical disk is secured.

Using the default encryption-at-rest option

Attach the disk to your VM

Go to the virtual machine you wish to add a data disk for.

You’ll notice in this step you could just as easily create a new disk directly to the VM. However, I created the one separately to highlight the flexibility and independence of data disks. This is an important concept and useful in many situations. For example, you could manage data disks in a different resource group and swap them around as needed.

Click on Disks in the menu
Click on “Add data disk” and select it from the drop-down list
Save

Prepare the disk in Linux

Login the the virtual machine using SSH or the serial console in the VM pane. Preparation of a new disk for use in Linux is basically two parts:

Partition the disk
Write file system to the disk; Format it

First, find the new disk using the command sudo fdisk -l and compare with the set of disks found earlier. In this case the new disk is /dev/sda

Partition the new disk

Now that we know with a high degree of confidence which is the new disk let’s partition it using fdisk:

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

Use the n command to add a new partition.
Choose p for a primary partition
Accept the default values for the next three options
Enter w to write the partition and finish

Format the new disk

Choose the file system format you want such as EXT4, FAT, MSDOS, etc. To see the different file system utilities on your system do: ls /sbin/mkfs*

In this case, we will format the disk with ext4 which is just fine.

Important! Notice the device path is now /dev/sda1. This is the result of partitioning the disk so make sure not to overwrite anything.

sudo mke2fs /dev/sda1
mke2fs 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)
Discarding device blocks: done
Creating filesystem with 2096896 4k blocks and 524288 inodes
...
done

Mount the disk

A word of caution. Microsoft Azure uses the /mnt directory as it’s temporary storage spot. Do not mount your disks there. To be safe, I like to create a new directory like /datadisks and use that.

$ sudo mkdir /datadisk
$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /datadisk
$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs           391M  668K  391M   1% /run
/dev/sdd1        29G  1.8G   28G   7% /
...
/dev/sda1       7.9G   18M  7.5G   1% /datadisk

Fix so the disk automounts

To ensure that the drive is automatically mounted after a reboot, add it to the /etc/fstab file.

Get the Universally Unique ID (UUID) of the new disk:

$ sudo -i blkid
...
/dev/sda1: UUID="27bdb6b5-2e86-4bd5-9e20-28eec9436a56"

Add an entry in the end of the /etc/fstab file like so:

$ sudo vim /etc/fstab

...

UUID=27bdb6b5-2e86-4bd5-9e20-28eec9436a56 /datadisk ext4 defaults,nofail 1 2

Finally, reboot the system to see if it all worked. My gosh, I hope you have a backup!

References

Deploy Azure VM using JSON template and PowerShell

May 4, 2020May 17, 2020 / Nr

Azure Resource Manager templates are JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files that define the infrastructure and configuration for your resources. In this case a virtual machine.

Steps in brief

Get the virtual machine template files from a known good deployment within Azure portal
Edit the parameters.json file
Run the deployment in PowerShell

Get the template files

There are several ways to get a template file for your deployments. Such as creating it from scratch, GitHub , or the Azure portal. Here, we are using Azure portal to download two files: template.json and parameters.json.

In the Azure portal go to the virtual machine you want to copy. Then click on the “Export Template” menu and then “Download”.

Edit the parameters.json file

The template files can be edited to suit your needs, however, the point of this exercise is to reuse an existing deployment. Looking in the parameters.json file, you’ll see most of the parameters & values are self-explanatory and can stay as is. However to avoid name collisions you’ll need to change only a few values.

These three below relate to the Name of the VM and should be unique:

networkInterfaceName
publicIpAddressName
virtualMachineName

You may notice the the value for the Administrator’s password or public key is “Null”. Azure does not export it in the template file so you must add it back in for the new deployment.

adminPublicKey

Deploy using Powershell

Now we are ready to deploy a new virtual machine based on the template files.

Using variables in the command line is optional although quite useful for scripting later on.
If you don’t give the “DeploymentName” it’ll default to something like “template”. I recommend using a name that’ll make sense when you see it in the Azure portal.

Open up Powershell and do the following:

$resourceGroupName = "DemoRG"

$templateFilePath = "/path/to/template.json"

$parametersFilePath = "/path/to/parameters.json"

New-AzResourceGroupDeployment -DeploymentName MyTemplateDeployTests `
 -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `
 -TemplateFile $templateFilePath `
 -TemplateParameterFile $parametersFilePath

After a few minutes you’ll see some details about the deployment like:

DeploymentName          : MyTemplateDeployTests
ResourceGroupName       : DemoRG
ProvisioningState       : Succeeded

.. and so on

Verify the deployment

If you want, here are steps to get the IP address and then SSH into the VM to look around. FYI, this is a Linux VM.

Get the VM public IP address then login using SSH. This will only work if the template is configured with Network Security Group that allows port 22 OR there is a Network Security Group applied to the selected “subnetName” OR similar.

Get the IP address

In the output of this command will be the VM’s public IP address. Note, $resourceGroupName is reused from previous steps. Replace “virtualMachineName” with the VM name you used in the parameters file.

Get-AzPublicIpAddress -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName -Name <VM Name>  | select IpAddress

OR This

Get-AzPublicIpAddress -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName | Where-Object {$_.name -like "*<VM Name>*" }

OR This

Get-AzPublicIpAddress -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName | Where-Object {$_.name -like "*<VM Name>*" } | Select-Object { $_.IpAddress }

Login to the VM

Goto to another terminal window and SSH into the VM. In this case, I am using my private key. Remember the public key was added to the parameters.json file.

ssh -i .ssh/id_rsa admin@192.168.1.1