Azure works beautifully with both React and ASP.NET Core apps. In ASP.NET Core, we can have different appsettings.json files to store the different settings for the different environments, such as database connection strings and the frontend location for CORS. In our React code, we can use an environment variable to make requests to the appropriate backend. We also need to include a web.config file in our React app so that deep links are redirected to the index.html page and then handled by React Router. The environment variable can be set in specific build npm scripts for each environment. We used three environments in this chapter, but both the frontend and backend could easily be configured to support more environments.

Azure has integration from both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code that makes deploying React and ASP.NET Core apps a breeze. We use the built-in Publish... option in Visual Studio to provision the SQL database with App Services and then perform the deployment. We can also provision App Services in the Azure Portal, which we did for our frontend. We can then use the Azure App Services Visual Studio Code extension to deploy the frontend to an App Service.

Although deploying our app to Azure was super easy, we can make it even easier by automating the deployment when we check code into source control. We'll do this in the next chapter.