Order: 2
Area: staticsite
TOCTitle: Create the application
PageTitle: Create the application
MetaDescription: Website deployment to Azure Storage with Visual Studio Code
DateApproved: 6/27/2018
Create your Node.js application
In this section, you will create a simple static website that can be deployed to the cloud. This tutorial uses create-react-app, a React utility CLI, to quickly scaffold out a simple React app from the terminal. However, if you want to use Angular, Vue, any other framework, or just a folder with a few HTML files, those will all work too.
Tip: If you already have your own application ready to deploy, you can skip ahead to Deploy the Website.
Install create-react-app tool
React is a popular framework for building web applications, so we will use it as an example. You can scaffold (create) a new React application using the create-react-app tool. The create-react-app tool is shipped as an npm module and can be installed by using npm.
npm install -g create-react-app
The -g switch installs the create-react-app globally on your machine so you can run it from anywhere.
Create a new application
Next, scaffold a new React app called my-react-app by running:
create-react-app my-react-app
And build the application by switching to the new folder and running npm run build.
cd my-react-app
npm run build
You should now have a build folder in your project folder. This contains the .html, .css, and .js files we will be deploying to Azure Storage.
Run the application
Finally, let's ensure that the application runs. From the terminal, start the application using the npm start command.
npm start
Now, open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000, where you should see something like this:
You are now ready to deploy your app!