We are excited to have Python support in Azure App Service on Linux. We are starting out our Python journey with support for 3.7. To create a Python app with az-cli, here is the command:

az webapp create -g "JlawDemoRG" -p "JlawDemoASP" -n "JlawPythonApp" --runtime "PYTHON|3.7"

To convert an existing app to Python:

az webapp config set -g "JlawDemoRG" -n "JlawPythonApp" --linux-fx-version "PYTHON|3.7"

Once an app is created, go ahead and git clone/push your favorite python app (mine being flask :)) Behind the scenes, we run python with gunicorn. We try to auto-detect the app (either flask or django) and try to launch the main script. However, if our detection logic is not able to find either of these, we fallback to the command specified in the startup file for the app:

az webapp config set -g "JlawDemoRG" -n "JlawPythonApp" --startup-file <start.txt>

The start.txt can contain the custom script to launch, or the full gunicorn command to launch the app. It can be something like: gunicorn --chdir /home/site/wwwroot/app -w 4 app:main, for an app whose main script file is within the app folder of the site content.

Here is the official quick start doc.

Credits

Asavari Tayal for all the detective work involved :). Also thanks to the various folks in Dev-Div for their guidance and valuable feedback.