The first time I deployed a production app to Azure, I spent three hours troubleshooting a crash that turned out to be one line: the app was listening on port 3000 instead of process.env.PORT. Azure injects its own port at runtime, and if your app ignores it, the health check fails silently and the whole thing dies on startup.
That was my introduction to cloud deployment. Since then I've deployed several production apps to Azure across different projects. I've made most of the mistakes worth making, and this guide is the walkthrough I wish I'd had.
We'll cover App Service, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, environment variables, and a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline that handles deployments automatically.
Prerequisites
An Azure account (free tier works for this guide)
