How the sausage gets made 🌭
Spoiler: it involved a lot of AI-assisted typing and remarkably few secrets.
Built with the GitHub Copilot App
This site — pages, styling, tiny Express server, SQL Database and the whole deployment pipeline — was built with AI assistance using GitHub Copilot - Not within VS Code - but the Github Copilot desktop app!
Copilot helped scaffold the HTML/CSS/JS, setup the server, and author the GitHub Actions workflow that ships it to Azure - it even built the games and created an admin interface for updating pages!
The infrastructure
The app runs on a deliberately cheap and cheerful setup: a B1 Basic tier Azure Linux App Service, and Azure SQL database - provisioned entirely as code using Bicep in a companion "lab" repo. No clicking around the Azure Portal — the infra is defined, versioned, and repeatable. There is a clear differentiation between infrastructure with data (such as SQL and storage) and ephemeral infrastructure which is deleted nightly.
The deployment pipeline
Every push to main triggers a GitHub Actions workflow that:
- Installs dependencies
- Logs into Azure using OIDC federated authentication — no client secrets or publish profiles stored anywhere
- Deploys straight to the App Service via azure/webapps-deploy