Import Azure Function from portal into Visual Studio

Question

I really like working with Azure functions in the portal but am starting to need some more tooling that I'm used to for committing to my git repo, easily adding assemblies, and just plain working in a more familiar environment.

Is it possible to create your Azure function app and possibly the functions themselves in the portal and then move over to Visual Studio and import that function app as a project? Or am I approaching this wrong? I understand we can create straight from Visual Studio and then publish up to Azure and maybe that is the way we should be doing it in the first place.

Answer 1

A few pieces you could do. You can start development in the portal and then download the app settings (connection strings, etc.) via the azure-function-core-tools with a CLI command like func azure functionapp fetch-app-settings <appName> - but that will just pull the settings into an existing local project.

You could also go to the Platform Settings tab and open the App Service Editor which would let you download the workspace as pictured below. That will download the function project into a folder you could check into source control and use with CI/CD.

However one important note is the portal for C# projects use C# script files (.csx), and the Visual Studio tools for Functions create .NET assemblies (.dll), so if using C# you wouldn't be able to download the workspace and open it up in Visual Studio - you'd likely be better off just copy/pasting the code into a Visual Studio project.

Personally since the latest v3 update of VS 2017 I find starting in Visual Studio is even more convenient than the portal was for Function apps.