The following steps will guide you on how to manually set up App Registrations. By default, App Registrations are created and used automatically across the pipelines, but the possibility of setting them up manually is available.
- An active Azure Subscription.
The Key Vault and App Registration creation/deletion stages can be skipped at runtime on the Create Shared Resources and Cleanup Resources. Running these stages without having assigned the required Service Principal permissions can lead to errors (although these errors won't interrupt the rest of the processes, so this step is optional). To skip stages, simple click on Stages to run, deselect them, and click Use selected stages before running the pipeline (see picture below).
App Registration credentials must be created for each bot to be deployed and tested (see Available Bots). To do this, you could head to App Registrations on Azure and create them one by one, but we created a PowerShell script to create registration batches automatically. The only requirement to run it is to have access to an active Azure account.
Click here to go to the script.
Executing the script will prompt you to log into your account with your default browser, then to define a prefix for the registration names, and finally for the amount of registrations to create. Both have default values (triggered by pressing Enter) to accommodate for the creation of eighteen credentials with generic names. The creation process will start, displaying each registration's name, ID, and password created while running.
Once all the credentials are created, the script will ask if you'd like to save them to a file for easier access. It will be saved in the same directory as the script in a file named AppRegistrations.json by default.
You'll have to create variables for each bot in the Deploy Bot Resources and Run Test Scenarios pipelines.
Alternatively, you could set the variables into a Key Vault or library, but we'll focus on the more straight-forward method of setting them up directly into the pipelines as it requires the least amount of permissions possible.
Head to your Deploy Bot Resources pipeline overview (click here for instructions on how to set pipelines up), and click on Edit (left of the Run pipeline button on the top right corner).
You will be redirected to the Edit view, here click on Variables (left of the Run button on the top right corner), and the Variables panel will pop up.
If you didn't have any variables set up already, it will look like the picture on the left; if you had, it will look like the one on the right. Click on New variable or the plus button respectively to start adding variables.
You must create a pair of variables for each bot in the list of available bots adding AppId and AppSecret to the bot's name.
For example:
- BffnEchoSkillBotComposerDotNetAppId
- BffnEchoSkillBotComposerDotNetAppSecret
Each credential pair can be populated with any of the ones created in the Create App Registrations step.
Don't forget to click on SAVE once you've finished setting up every variable.
Lastly, you'll have to create new variables for the Run Test Scenarios, same steps apply. This pipeline requires only the App Registration IDs of the skill bots, so the list is shorter. For example:
- BffnEchoSkillBotComposerDotnetAppId
Just be sure to use the same IDs as with the Deploy Bot Resources pipeline.