Modernising Registrar Technology: Implementing EPP with Kotlin, Spring & Azure Container Apps

Once these settings have been configured, press Start continuous deployment.

If all went to plan, Azure will have created a workflow file in your repository under .github/workflows with the commit message Create an auto-deploy file. Based on the content of the workflow, we can see that the trigger is on push to master. This means that, moving forward, every change you commit and push to this repository will trigger this workflow, which will in-turn trigger a build and push the new container image to the registry.

However, it is likely that on the first build it will fail. This is because we need to make a couple modifications to this workflow file before it will work with our technology stack. You will need to add these changes manually, so head into the workflow and begin editing as with any other file (either through GitHub or VSC – do not forget to push if VSC!). Then, add the following jobs after Checkout to the branch and before the Azure Login job:

- name: Grant execute permission for gradlew
  run: chmod +x gradlew

- name: Set up JDK 21
  uses: actions/setup-java@v2
  with:
    java-version: '21'
    distribution: 'adopt'

- name: Build with Gradle
  run: ./gradlew build

We added 3 jobs:

1. Grant execute permission to gradlew – gradlew is a wrapper script that helps manage Gradle installations. This step grants execute permission to the gradlew file which allows this build process to execute Gradle commands, needed for the next steps.
2. Set up JDK – This sets up the JDK as the Java envrionment for the build process. Make sure this matches the Java version you have chosen to use for this tutorial.
3. Build with Gradle – This executes the Gradle build process which will compile our Java code and package it into a JAR file which will then be used by the last job to push to the Container Registry.

The final workflow file should look like this:

name: Trigger auto deployment

# When this action will be executed
on:
  # Automatically trigger it when detected changes in repo
  push:
    branches: 
      [ master ]
    paths:
    - '**'
    - '.github/workflows/AutoDeployTrigger-aec369b2-f21b-47f6-8915-0d087617a092.yml'

  # Allow manual trigger 
  workflow_dispatch:      

jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions: 
      id-token: write #This is required for requesting the OIDC JWT Token
      contents: read #Required when GH token is used to authenticate with private repo

    steps:
      - name: Checkout to the branch
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Grant execute permission for gradlew
        run: chmod +x gradlew

      - name: Set up JDK 21
        uses: actions/setup-java@v2
        with:
          java-version: '21'
          distribution: 'adopt'

      - name: Build with Gradle
        run: ./gradlew build

      - name: Azure Login
        uses: azure/login@v1
        with:
          client-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CLIENT_ID }}
          tenant-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_TENANT_ID }}
          subscription-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID }}

      - name: Build and push container image to registry
        uses: azure/container-apps-deploy-action@v2
        with:
          appSourcePath: ${{ github.workspace }}
          _dockerfilePathKey_: _dockerfilePath_
          registryUrl: fdcontainers.azurecr.io
          registryUsername: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_USERNAME }}
          registryPassword: ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD }}
          containerAppName: epp-api
          resourceGroup: registrar
          imageToBuild: registrarcontainers.azurecr.io/fdspring:${{ github.sha }}
          _buildArgumentsKey_: |
            _buildArgumentsValues_

Once you have pushed your workflow changes, that action itself will trigger the new workflow and hopefully you should be met with a green circle on GitHub at the top of your repository to signify the build was a success. Do not forget that at any point you can click the Actions tab and see the result of all builds, and if any build fails you can explore in detail on which job the error occured.