Deploying Rebase on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure offers tight integrations and enterprise compliance. The optimal architecture for running Rebase on Azure involves using Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server for the data layer and Azure Container Apps for hosting the backend container.

To adhere to European data compliance and fast local response times, provision your resources in regions like West Europe (Amsterdam), North Europe (Ireland), or France Central (Paris).

1. Provision PostgreSQL Flexible Server

1. From the Azure Portal, search for and select Azure Database for PostgreSQL servers.
2. Click Create and select Flexible Server.
3. Choose your Resource Group and set your preferred EU Region.
4. Select your Compute size (e.g., General Purpose or Burstable B2s for smaller deployments).
5. Setup the Authentication tab with an Admin username and a secure password.
6. Under Networking, ensure “Allow public access from any Azure service within Azure to this server” is checked so your Container App can connect, or configure a secure VNet.
7. Note down your server name and assemble the connection URI: postgresql://your_admin:YOUR_PASSWORD@your-server-name.postgres.database.azure.com:5432/postgres

2. Build and Push to Azure Container Registry (ACR)

Azure Container Apps will pull your Docker image from ACR.

1. Create a new Container Registry in your chosen EU region.
2. Login from your CLI:

   az acr login --name YourRegistryName

3. Build and push the Rebase image from the project root — the backend Dockerfile needs the whole workspace as its build context (it copies pnpm-workspace.yaml, backend/, and config/), so ./backend as the context will fail:

   docker build -t yourregistryname.azurecr.io/rebase-backend:latest -f backend/Dockerfile .
   docker push yourregistryname.azurecr.io/rebase-backend:latest

3. Deploy Azure Container App

Azure Container Apps provides a serverless container environment with built-in HTTPS ingress.

1. Search the portal for Container Apps and click Create.
2. Create a new Container Apps Environment in your EU region.
3. In the Container tab, point to your ACR registry and select the rebase-backend:latest image.
4. Set the Environment variables:

Name	Value
DATABASE_URL	Your Azure Postgres connection string
JWT_SECRET	A Secure random 32+ character string
REBASE_SERVICE_KEY	A Secure random 32+ character string
NODE_ENV	production
CORS_ORIGINS	Your frontend domain (e.g., https://yourdomain.com)
FRONTEND_URL	Your frontend URL (used for email links and CORS fallback)
ALLOW_REGISTRATION	false (set to true only during initial setup)

5. Under the Ingress tab, explicitly Enable Ingress.
6. Set the Target Port to 3001.
7. Complete the creation. Azure will automatically provision the container and provide you an Application URL secured with TLS!

Create the Database Schema

The container is running, but Rebase only auto-creates the auth tables on boot — the tables for your own collections are not created automatically. Run this once against the production database, or every collection returns a “missing table” error:

pnpm run db:push

Run it from a checkout of your project (or your CI job) with DATABASE_URL set to your Azure Database for PostgreSQL connection string (add a firewall rule allowing your client IP if needed). The deployed image doesn’t include the CLI, so this doesn’t run inside the container. For versioned migrations, commit migration files with pnpm run db:generate and run pnpm run db:migrate instead.