How to deploy Azure WebJob as part of automatic VSTS deployment

Question

Is there a way of having my Azure WebJob automatically deploy without needing to right click and select "Publish as Azure WebJob" every time? i.e. when I check-in my solution it is automatically deploy to the Azure Portal webjob section

Answer 1

While I tried to accomplish this, I found out that there is no tooling support for dotnet core projects as of now. The proposed webjobs.props/ msbuild solutions are all dotnet framework specific.

However I also found out that a webjob can be anything that's executable on the local machine (could be node.js or just a batch command).

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The key is to understand how WebJobs are recognized by the host:

• A WebJob on a Windows host is (by what I gathered from experimenting with it) just a run.cmd file that contains instructions on how to start the webJob. For dotnet core that would be dotnet MyDll.dll %* (%* to pass arguments for output redirection etc. down from the host).
• Now depending on wether the job is continuous or triggered the run.cmd file needs to be located either at app_data/jobs/continuous/[NameOfJob] or app_data/jobs/triggered/[NameOfJob]. For the triggered job you could also add a schedule using a settings.job file like described here.
• If there is a run.cmd at the proper location it will be recognized as a WebJob

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Now to deploy a webjob using VSTS regardless of the runtime framework follow these steps:

1. Build/Publish your WebJob if necessary to get the executables
2. Add a run.cmd file next to your webjob executables that contains the proper startup instructions. You could also add settings.job here if needed.
3. Create the folder hierarchy app_data/jobs/[triggered/continuous]/[nameOfJob] and copy your executables into the lowest folder. Make sure run.cmd is directly under the [nameOfJob]/ directory
4. Zip the app_data folder so that the zip-package contains the entire hierarchy
5. Publish your zip file using the normal Azure App Service Deployment task (just like deploying the web app)

And that's it.