Published on May 1, 2020
Go homeMetabase on Azure AppService
Metabase is an open source analytics tool which allows you to explore and visualise your data. These visualisations can be grouped into dashboards and shared or embedded within or outside of your organisation. In this post I will show you how to setup Metabase as an AppService on Azure using the official Docker image and a MySQL database. Creating a Managed MySQL DB
Login to the Azure portal and search for mysql
. Select Azure Database for MySQL servers
and click Create Azure Database for MySQL server
. Next up fill out the necessary details, tags and provision your database instance. Managed services can be quite expensive so be sure to check the estimated monthly cost of the resource. If you intend on following this guide for learning purposes only, be sure to destroy the resource once you are done.
After a few minutes your server will be provisioned and ready to accept connections. Before deploying Metabase we must first ensure we have done the following:
- Allow access to Azure services
- Add your IP address to the firewall white list
- Create a database for the Metabase application
- Create a user for the Metabase application with the appropriate access to the Metabase database
Allow Access to Azure Services
On the resource detail page click Connection security
under the settings group and then set Allow access to Azure services
to Yes
. Add IP Address to White List
On the resource detail page click Connection security
under the settings group and add your public facing IP address to the firewall white list. Create Database and User
You will need to connect to the server in order to create a database
and user
for the Metabase application. I use the community edition of DBeaver as a SQL IDE. Connect to the server and run the following command (You can find the connection details under the Connection strings
blade on the resource detail page). One thing to note is that any Azure database as a service requires SSL when connecting. In DBeaver you will need to check Use SSL
and Require SSL
under the SSL
tab of the new connection screen.
CREATE DATABASE metabase CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 collate utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
CREATE USER `metabase`@`%` IDENTIFIED BY 'my strong password';
GRANT ALL ON metabase.* TO 'metabase'@'%';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Note the character set
and collation
above, these are required. Creating an App Service
We are going to deploy metabase using the official Docker image as an AppService on the Azure platform. In the Azure portal search for app services
. Select App Services
and click Create app service
. Fill out the app service details but be sure to select Docker Container
under the Publish
input. If you are hosting your database on Azure it would be a good idea to set the App Service region to the region in which the database is hosted. On the Docker
tab of the wizard select Single Container
as the value of Options
and Docker Hub
as the value of Image Source
. Leave Access type
as Public
and type metabase/metabase
as the value of the Image and tag
input. You can leave the Startup Command
input blank. You can enabled monitoring if you like and don't forget to apply some useful tags. Click create on the Review and Create
section of the wizard.
Once you App Service is provisioned we need to set a few environment variables so that Metabase can connect to the MySQL instance. Click on Configuration
under the Settings
group of the App Service resource detail page. You will be presented with a table of application settings. By default the settings should include DOCKER_REGISTRY_SERVER_PASSWORD
, DOCKER_REGISTRY_SERVER_URL
, DOCKER_REGISTRY_SERVER_USERNAME
and WEBSITES_ENABLE_APP_SERVICE_STORAGE
. Leave these values as you found them and add the following settings:
MB_DB_TYPE = "mysql"
MB_ENCRYPTION_SECRET_KEY = "<A randomly generated string of text>"
MB_DB_CONNECTION_URI = "mysql://metabase:<my strong password>@<server host>:3306/metabase?useSSL=true&requireSSL=true"
Note you should replace Give it a few minutes to bring up the container, if you want to track the build progress you can select the metabase
database user and Azure Database for MySQL server
resource detail page. Once you have assigned your application settings click Save
and then click the Restart
button on the Overview
page. Log stream
page under the Monitoring
group in the side menu. When the container is up navigate to the App Service URL. The URL can be found on the Overview
page. You should be presented with the following welcome page.