Looking for best practices deploying to Azure Web App

Question

I have a client who is requiring me to move a production site into his Azure environment, and rather than just making a VM available to me, he's provided me with a Web App with a PHP runtime. I'm not a fan of that particular flavor of cloud nor that specific service, but the choices are not mine to make.

If anybody here has experience deploying Craft (ideally v4) in such an environment, I'd very much like to connect and discuss best practices. I'd like to avoid using the native deployment tools, because I simply don't like the stack and prefer running composer and the craft executable from the CLI to deploy changes I've made in dev and pushed to version control. But if that is not possible in this particular evironment, exactly that is the kind of thing I'd like to learn in such an exchange.

Two very specific questions I have, though, are:

1. How can the requirement for "Full timezone support" be met, when there is no admin level access to the mysql database?
2. How are composer and craft commands being issued in an environment where ALL files are owned by nobody:nogroup and the only login account available is root?

Best, Andy

Answer 1

Sorry if this is bad practice answering my own question in part, but I've actually just discovered how to add timezone support in the MySQL (flexible) DB attached to the Web App.

The necessary tables are provided during initial DB creation, they are just not populated. They can be filled, however, by executing a provided stored procedure. Just log in to the the DB, and:

  use mysql;
  call az_load_timezone();

This populates the tables in the mysql schema and satisfies the prerequisit in Craft.