{"id":2130,"date":"2016-10-31T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-31T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/reallifecode\/index.php\/2016\/10\/31\/automated-azure-template-validations\/"},"modified":"2020-03-15T06:50:43","modified_gmt":"2020-03-15T13:50:43","slug":"automated-azure-template-validations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/ise\/automated-azure-template-validations\/","title":{"rendered":"Automated Azure Template Validations"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past year, Azure introduced the concept of \u2018Resource Groups\u2019 and the ability to write templates to deploy resources to Azure<\/a>. This makes it easy to describe your infrastructure as code which you can easily redeploy.<\/p>\n

The Azure engineering team maintains an open source repository of sample templates<\/a> where anyone can contribute a useful template that can be used by anyone to deploy resources to Azure. For example, you can deploy anything from a simple Linux virtual machine to an entire Mesos cluster with Marathon and Swarm and pretty much anything in between. This repository has become the central place for all community-curated templates<\/a> for provisioning Azure resources for a variety of partners such as WordPress, Dokku, Deis, Cloud Foundry and many others.<\/p>\n

The Problem<\/h2>\n

When maintaining an open source repository, it\u2019s important to make clear the expectation of quality and validation in each contribution to that project. Many times that\u2019s done by utilizing continuous integration to validate that contributions work and don\u2019t regress any other part of the project. This method makes projects very contribution-friendly while driving the quality of the project for users.<\/p>\n

As the Quickstart Templates<\/a> project has grown, one of the problems encountered is the review process for each new template that enters the repository. Validation of the template wasn\u2019t very streamlined, and there wasn\u2019t any per-merge validation of submitted templates. The people reviewing submissions must manually validate them, which makes it tough to spot pesky bugs in templates before deployment as well as during actual template deployments. This issue led to many template files having errors from JSON syntax validation to problems deploying to Azure Resource Manager (ARM).<\/p>\n

What the project needed was a community-friendly way of doing basic validation of a template, as well as deploying the template to Azure to test that it works. This approach provides a guarantee to the community that every submitted and modified template works for users who wish to use them.<\/p>\n

The Solution<\/h2>\n

Travis CI<\/a> is one of the most trusted CI-as-a-Service platforms in the industry for open source projects. They provide free compute time for open source projects to run tests for each commit and pull request received on GitHub. Because JSON templates comprise the Quickstart Templates repository, using JavaScript tooling to run tests comes quite natural.<\/p>\n

The solution requires templates to be validated end-to-end in an automated way which is public enough for everyone in the community to view. At the same time, the solution cannot expose the credentials of the test account. The Azure Quickstart Templates repository is unique in that nearly all templates are self-contained in their folder, and each should conform to a uniform convention. A typical template folder has the following structure:<\/p>\n