Using GitHub Environment Files for Actions Workflow Outputs

Using GitHub Environment Files for Actions Workflow Outputs

For one of my side projects, I use GitHub Actions to build and deploy my various microservices to Azure. In my workflows, I’ll often retrieve a value (such as getting the name of a container registry), and use the set-output command within my pipeline so that I can use the value of that output further down my pipeline. This is an example of what using the set-output command would look like in your GitHub Action workflow: ...

January 6, 2025 · 4 min · Will Velida
Building a token refresh service for the Fitbit API with Container App Jobs

Building a token refresh service for the Fitbit API with Container App Jobs

A couple of years back, I built a Fitbit API token refresh service using Azure Functions. The purpose of that function was to refresh an access token that I can use to make calls to the Fitbit API and extract my own data using Azure Functions. This was before Azure Container Apps even existed, so Azure Functions was really the only option. WebJobs was an alternative (after all, Functions are essentially built on top of Azure WebJobs), but that wasn’t attractive since this was just an hobby project, and I didn’t want to break the bank. The problem with Azure Functions is that you’re restricted with the programming model. It’s fine if you just need the plumbing done for you for simple integrations, but if you want the flexibility, it’s not great. ...

December 12, 2024 · 12 min · Will Velida
How to purge stale images from Azure Container Registry with ACR Tasks and GitHub Actions

How to purge stale images from Azure Container Registry with ACR Tasks and GitHub Actions

Cleaning up stale images (images that you’re not using) from your Azure Container Registry is important for a couple of reasons. First off, storing images in ACR isn’t free. Even with the Basic SKU, once you go past your 10GB limit, you end up paying $0.00516 AUD (at the time of writing) per GB of additional storage. If you have container images that are just sitting there not being used, it’ll waste money and second, it’ll be difficult to manage your images. ...

December 6, 2024 · 9 min · Will Velida
Deploy to Azure with Terraform and GitHub Actions

Deploying to Azure with Terraform and GitHub Actions

I’m building my own Azure Kubernetes Cluster that I can use for my personal development, and I’ve been wanting to improve my Terraform skills, so I’ve spent a bit of time over the past couple of days getting a Terraform deployment to work with GitHub Actions. The AzureRM provider has moved on a bit since I’ve used it in anger, so I learnt a lot about the different resources that are available, and how we can use GitHub Actions to deploy Terraform templates to Azure. ...

September 19, 2024 · 21 min · Will Velida
Managing Secrets in Azure Container Apps

Managing Secrets in Azure Container Apps

Azure Container Apps allows your apps to secure sensitive configuration values as secrets. Once you define your secrets, you can pass them as configuration to revisions of your Container Apps, and as secured values to your scale rules. In this article, I’ll discuss what secrets are, where we can define secrets, and how we can reference them in our application’s environment variables. If you want to watch a video that talks about these concepts, check out the video below! ...

March 26, 2024 · 5 min · Will Velida