I wanted to add some CI/CD (more CI than CD) to some of my GitHub projects. There’s several options available for this, including online or on-prem. Two seemed to catch my eye on other GitHub repositories, Appveyor and Circleci.

Both offer free plans which, as you’d expect, have some limitations. However for the most part these are things that don’t matter too much to my projects, i.e. you may be limited to public repositories only (hence they’re supporting OSS), probably only run a single build at a time etc.

Let’s get started

The application we’re going to look into here is AppVeyor.

Simply create an account and I used GitHub authentication to sign in – seemed logical as I was ultimately wanting this to integrate into GitHub.

Once you’ve signed in you’ll be presented with an Install button to install their app. into your GitHub space – I assume this is how it works, I’ve not looked into it further, either way this hooks into your repo. changes and triggers your project’s build.

Next up you go to the Project option in the Appveyor UI and select New Project. To be honest all is pretty obvious. Now with the GitHub integration you’ll get a list of available projects from your GitHub account.

Select Add and you’re done! Well sort of…

You may need to make some configuration changes, either within the Appveyor UI or better still (imho) via their DSL.

All you need to do is add a file named appveyor.yml. Here’s a simple example for a .NET project

version: 1.0.{build}

image: Visual Studio 2019

build:
  verbosity: minimal

before_build:
- cmd: nuget restore

Checkout the appveyor.yml reference for more information.

Basically what we’ve done in the above yml, is created a a build version, this will be displayed within the Appveyor UI when you inspect builds. Next we’ve stated what image we want to use to build our project, obviously Visual Studio 2019 is specified for my .NET projects.

The build can be set to quiet, minimal, normal or detailed. For now mine is minimal.

Finally I’ve added a pre-build step (before_build) and listed the command nuget restore. This was because for the projects I’ve tried, I have to update the nuget packaged first.

We’re not specifying the branches, but we can add a whitelist of branches that should be part of the build like this

branches:
  only:
    - master
    - production

By default Appveyor detects whether there’s tests and can run these automatically, but you might prefer to set a custom test step. For example I found an F# project ran tests fine locally but failed on Appveyor, adding the following solve this (here I’ve specified the assembly to test)

test_script:
- cmd: dotnet test FSharp.Units.Tests

Next up we’ll want to have a badge in our README.md so we can see the state of our build or better still, others can see the state of our build. If you select the project’s settings and then the Badges option, there’s a sample markdown code section where you can just copy the markdown and place in your README.md and it’ll show the build status in a nice little indicator.

Here we’ve looked at the basics for setting up a build with the DSL. Obviously this is a great way of doing things, but whilst setting up your DSL it means for every change, you need to commit and push then wait for the build to complete to see if everything works. In Appveyor you can go to the Setting | General option of your project and click Ignore appveyor.yml and instead set everything up in the Appveyor UI. Then you can go to the Settings | Export YAML option to generate your configuration.

That should get you started.