In my previous post I talked about using CI/CD along with GitHub and in that post we concentrated on Appveyor. Let’s now look at one of the alternatives, Circleci.

As you’d expect, you need to create an account and I used GitHub authentication as I wanted this CI/CD application working with my GitHub projects. It’s probably not a requirement but certainly everything integrated nicely (I’ve not yet seen if that differs with alternative repositories hosts).

Once you’ve created your account you’ll need to install the Circleci application within GitHub – I actually don’t recall the process but I suspect there’s an “Install Application” button or the likes.

Let’s get started

Due to the GitHub integration you’ll see a list of your projects. Simply press the Set Up Project button. That’s pretty much all there is to it to get started, but we’re probably going to want to customise the process.

In your project’s repository add the file config.yml into the .circleci folder, as below

.circleci/config.yml

This allows us to write the configuration for our Circleci build pipeline using a DSL. Here’s one for an F# project I have in Circleci

 version: 2.1

 orbs:
  win: circleci/windows@2.2.0

 jobs:
   build:
     executor: win/default     
    
     steps:
       - checkout
       - run: dotnet build
       - run: dotnet test Image.Processing.Tests

In this case we’re using the 2.1 (see CircleCI 2.1 Configuration Reference Guide.

The first thing we do (after setting the version of the DSL) is to map to an orb definition. In this case we’re using a predefined orb, we can actually create our own orbs if needed (but we’re not going there at the moment, or maybe ever, we’ll have to wait and see).

Note: An orb is a shareable package of configuration, see Explore Orbs for a whole bunch of different orbs..

Now we supply the jobs. In this case a build job using win/default, basically a Windows image.

Next we set up the build steps. These are self-explanatory, as you’d expect, we need to checkout our code, build the code and then run our tests. There’s a checkout step, the rest can be thought of as simply commands to run.

We’re now going to want to add a badge to the README.md in our project to allow us and others to see the status of our build.

Unlike Appveryor (unless I’m missing something, in which case I’ll update this post later) there’s no copy & paste option for the badge link, instead have a look as Adding Status Badges, here’s the template

[![<ORG_NAME>](https://circleci.com/<VCS>/<ORG_NAME>/<PROJECT_NAME>.svg?style=svg)](<LINK>)

So for my F# Image.Processing project this looks like the following

[![putridparrot](https://circleci.com/gh/putridparrot/Image.Processing.svg?style=svg)](https://circleci.com/gh/circleci/circleci-docs)

At this time, I’m not sure how to link to the specific build (or whether this is possible), I ‘ll add to this post in the future if I find it’s possible.

Note: If you prefer, change style=svg to style=shield for a different looking status image.

That should get you started.