How to disable Oryx builds for Node.js project in Azure App Service?

Question

Hello. On our project, we are deploying a Next.js app to a F1 Tier Linux instance of an App Service via Github Actions. We create a production-ready build using output: standalone of Next.js, which does not require npm i or npm build steps to be boot up. However, on the Azure side, the Oryx builder takes over the deployment and calls the above-mentioned commands which bloat the instance with ±300mb of unnecessary Node dependencies and increase the build time.

The solution would be to tell Oryx to not build the project, or to disable Oryx altogether. However, neither option is possible as Oryx seems to ignore the Application Settings that are meant to alter its behaviour as per these docs:

https://github.com/microsoft/Oryx/blob/main/doc/configuration.md

https://github.com/microsoft/Oryx/blob/main/doc/hosts/appservice.md

Here are the Settings from our Azure panel. The green ones are available to the application, while the red, Oryx-related ones have no effect (for all of them both 0/1 and true/false values were tried)

Apparently, this issue is not new, as noted in this question: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/757750/azure-function-apps-oryx-build-continues-to-run-ev. However, the solutions that worked for Azure Functions then has no effect in our case.

Could somebody indicate what we are possibly missing with this issue, and how to fix this behaviour? Thank you in advance

Answer 1

Thanks for the suggestion. However, we did not need to test it out as, fortunately for us, the issue resolved itself after we tried creating a new F1 tier Linux Web App resource without any Settings, where the Kudu build system took over the deployment and worked just fine without any config by unpacking the zip artifact and running it.

I'd like to note some other features of our setup that might have affected the behaviour of Oryx (might be useful for people that encounter similar problem, or for Azure maintainers who will look into the issue of Oryx being ignorant to env variables):

• The service was first created as a B1 tier instance
• Subsequently, the pipeline settings (Github Actions) were set at service creation time, and we used the .yml config file for actions that Azure has automatically created for us.

Also, I want to share our Github Action responsible for deployment in case somebody finds it useful, as it allows to fit a simple Next.js app into a F1 Tier instance regardless of whether an excessive npm i + npm run build step occurs or not (i.e. whether it is Oryx or Kudu that deploys the code):

name: Build and deploy Node.js app to Azure Web App - ***

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      
      - name: Set up Node.js version
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: '>=18.12.0' # Requirement in our case, may be different in yours

      - name: Build in standalone mode
        working-directory: ./<work_dir_name>
        env: # Github repo secrets
          NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL: ${{ secrets.NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL }}
          NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY: ${{ secrets.NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY }}
        run: |
          CI=true npm install
          npm run build
      
      - name: Copy non-source files into the standalone build folder
        working-directory: ./<work_dir_name>
        run: |
          cp -r public .next/standalone/public
          cp -r .next/static .next/standalone/.next/static
      # AS it is currently impossible to alter the behaviour of Web App builder, it is necessary to remove Dev- and build-time-specific scripts as they will crash in CI, and remove devDeps to make the final release slimmer.     
      - name: Modify standalone build package.json 
        working-directory: ./<work_dir_name>/.next/standalone
        run: |
          npm pkg delete scripts.postinstall scripts.prepare devDependencies
          npm pkg set scripts.start="node server.js" scripts.build="echo \"Using results of a pipeline build\" "
  
      - name: Zip standalone folder into a deployment artifact
        working-directory: ./<work_dir_name>  
        run: cd .next/standalone && zip ../../release.zip * .next -qr

      - name: Upload artifact for deployment job
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: node-app
          path: ./<work_dir_name>/release.zip

  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: build
    environment:
      name: 'Production'
      url: ${{ steps.deploy-to-webapp.outputs.webapp-url }}

    steps:
      - name: Download artifact from build job
        uses: actions/download-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: node-app

      - name: 'Deploy to Azure Web App'
        id: deploy-to-webapp
        uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v2
        with:
          app-name: *** # Your app name in Azure
          slot-name: *** # Most likely 'Production'
          publish-profile: ${{ secrets.AZUREAPPSERVICE_PUBLISHPROFILE_*** }}
          package: release.zip
      
      - name: Artifact cleanup
        run: rm release.zip

Answer 2

You can set "CUSTOM_BUILD_COMMAND" to something else to replace default npm run build command. E.g. just change it to echo "Not doing anything"