Azure Ghost Cms and Cdn

I moved my blog onto HUGO. Not everyone would want to do this necessarily, there is a bit of a learning curve, part of the reason I DID IT :). However there are other platforms you can use and still add more functionality if you want.

You can use Ghost and add an Azure CDN. This is what this blog post will cover.

There are some very clever people out there that have made this very easy for you. From my research you have 2 main options.

1. A “simple Web App”
2. More complex deployment with Containers and a CDN - now this sounds interesting.

For this post I naturally focused on option 2 :). A BIG shoutout goes to Andrew Matveychuk. I am all about “Standing on the shoulders of giants”. I used his repo and then forked it into mine. He has a nice blogpost on his journey. I simply unpacked this a little further and went into some more details and highlight some of the potential gotchas and setting up things in more detail with specific focus on the Azure Portal.

Deployment

The deployment is nice and easy thanks to a one-click deploy - thanks again Andrew Matveychuk.

It “deploys” pretty quickly but, of course, this is just the start of the work.

During deployment

During the deployment of the application you will see the Web App change.

Almost

Success!!!
You will see something SIMILAR to this.

Gotcha with Container Deployment

The solution takes a while to deploy - this seems to be due to some changes made recently by Docker. Do NOT be hasty like I was, this can cause issues and create the need for a re-deploy. Instead lets use the logs to see what is going on :)
Now let’s find the log I was talking about. We are waiting for this entry

So, now to add move value, we can add an Azure CDN (in this case, this has already been done) and look at configuring your own custom name for this.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that can efficiently deliver web content to users. CDNs’ store cached content on edge servers in point-of-presence (POP) locations that are close to end users, to minimize latency.

So we can add a custom domain to a CDN to make this more pretty and give your site a more more friendly name - you can move away from the https://xyz.azurewebsites.net, I definitely think a custom domain is far cleaner and “more professional”. So let’s dive in and get this done. :)

So, there a few steps to get this done. This is well documented here, however I will provide more context and give some sample screenshots.

We have some DNS Settings to configure as per the above article. Below, I have added some sample for the CDN demo I configure for this blog.

1. Create the required verification entries in your DNS Zone. I use ClouDNS but the process is the same, just how you create the required entries will vary with each provider. This process should not take too long, but now we want a certificate and the joys of TLS
2. Start the verification process
3. Domain Verification
4. Create a certificate
5. And completed

Now here is the end result - note the HTTPS 👍