Executing a script

I have a few questions, because the current documentation seemed a bit thin. I’d like to deploy a VM and an Azure SQL database by Farmer. Very basic software architecture. For that, I need to execute a few scripts:

1. Virtual Machine,

   • Execute cmd/bat/shell-script. That is possible, but can that be done by Farmer?
     • Install Chocolatey @powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin
     • Install a few programs like choco install dotnet4.7.2 -y
     • A way to transfer a few files. By installing SSH I guess?
     • Configure Windows firewall, e.g.: netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Open Port HTTPS" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=443
     • Install certificate (certutil) and apply certificate to the port: netsh http add sslcert ipport=0.0.0.0:443 certhash=123abc... appid=abc124...
     • Create a service sc create MyService binPath= c:\path\myservice.exe
     • …and set it to auto-start: sc config "MyService" start= auto
   • I also need to configure the Azure side Network interface for the VM, I couldn’t find Farmer command for that.
   • Set a static IP for VM. I guess this is already supported.

2. Deploy the Azure Database.

   • Create a new login.
   • Execute an *.sql-script that creates the tables, and inserts some basic data. Azure supports that, but can that be done with Farmer?
   • For the database version control, I’m using VisualStudio SQL Server Database Project (*.sqlproj). Is that messing my architecture-as-code?

What is the preferred way to do these with Farmer?

[isaacabraham]

VMs

1. Scripts - you can run a post-deployment script on a VM in an ARM template. We haven’t exposed that yet in Farmer but there’s no reason why we couldn’t - I suggest raising an issue.
2. Transferring files - we could build a post-deploy task to upload files from the local machine onto the VM. The pure ARM way is to upload files into a storage account first and then reference them in the ARM template. However, this requires a storage account to have been already created and the files uploaded. An alternative is to upload via Azure CLI or SSH - again, Farmer could wrap this up; it’s what we do for app service.
3. Firewall - this should be possible in ARM, I suggest looking through the docs - if it’s there, we can expose it.
4. I believe that static IPs are already supported.

Databases

1. I don’t know if you can create separate logins within ARM - I believe it’s just the standard admin login. Again, can you check the ARM docs for SQL?
2. When you say “Azure can do that” - do you mean the portal? The portal uses all sorts of different things; Farmer is essentially a wrapper around what ARM templates support plus some extensions that wrap around the Azure CLI for things that ARM doesn’t support.

Database version control and deployments are a separate concern to Farmer - it shouldn’t impact infrastucture-as-code at all (indeed, we’re using dbprojects right now with Farmer - it should just work.

[isaacabraham]

This has now been released.