Al-Folio Azure Deployment

Needing a personal website as a portfolio as well as a place to document projects, I evaluated two options: a custom-built website or a sufficiently powerful template. After exploring Al-Folio, I determined that it was exactly what I needed.

I chose to deploy it on Azure Static Web Apps to gain hands-on experience with the platform while taking advantage of the free tier. Since this wasn’t a documented deployment method for Al-Folio, it presented an interesting technical challenge.

What went wrong

After creating my personal website repository and configuring Azure Static Web Apps, I encountered issues with Oryx (Azure’s build tool). Every Build and Deploy job in GitHub Actions failed with the error: “Could not find either ‘build’ or ‘build:azure’ node under ‘scripts’ in package.json.”

Adding the build command to package.json didn’t resolve the issue. Instead, it introduced a new error where Oryx was unable to install the gemfiles necessary to build the Jekyll site.

How I figured it out

I spent time learning how GitHub Actions worked while troubleshooting the Oryx build failures. When I noticed the failing command was pulling a build action from Microsoft’s Azure GitHub repository, I went directly to the source documentation.

The documentation revealed I could disable Oryx entirely using the skip_app_build flag and rely on Al-Folio’s existing build action instead. I merged the two workflows and disabled Oryx’s build process. This yielded the result you are looking at now, success.

What I learned

This project taught me a substantial amount about Github Actions and how automated builds with Docker and Github Actions works in general. I’m proud that I was able to deploy this site with an undocumented method by exploring documentation, logs and experimenting with different approaches.