GitHub actions allows us to add workflows to our projects.
In the previous three posts we looked at using Appveyor, Circleci and Travis CI to create our CI/CD pipelines, now let’s look at using GitHub Actions.
- From your GitHub project, select the Actions tab
- GitHub kindly lists a suggested workflow, so as my project is in C# it suggests a .NET Core build action, select Set up this workflow if it suits your needs (it does for this example)
- You’ll now get to edit the Actions yml configuration, I’ll accept it by clicking Start commit and this will add the dotnet-core.yml to .github/workflows. Just click commit to add it to your repository.
- From the Actions | .NET Core workflow, press the Create status badge, then Copy status badge Markdown and place this markdown into your README.md
Note: If you’re using the .NET Core workflow and using multi targets (i.e. <TargetFrameworks>netcoreapp3.1;net472</TargetFrameworks> then you may find the build failing because the .NET 4.7.2 frameworks is not installed.
The process described above, demonstrated that we have a YML based DSL for creating our workflow, checkout Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions.
Let’s take a look at a workflow file for one of my projects – in this case .NET core was not suitable, instead I wanted .NET Framework
name: .NET Core
on:
push:
branches: [ master ]
pull_request:
branches: [ master ]
jobs:
build:
runs-on: windows-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Setup MSBuild Path
uses: warrenbuckley/Setup-MSBuild@v1
- name: Setup NuGet
uses: NuGet/setup-nuget@v1.0.2
- name: Restore NuGet Packages
run: nuget restore MyApplication.sln
- name: Build
run: msbuild MyApplication.sln /p:Configuration=Release /p:DeployOnBuild=true
The name is what you’ll see in your list of GitHub actions (via the GitHub project’s Actions tab/button, this workflow monitors pushes and pull requests on master and then has a list of jobs to undertake once this workflow is triggered.
We’re going to run this workflow on Windows as the project is a .NET framework application. The steps of the workflow specify the “parts” required to build and test the project, so require the checkout action and Setup-MSBuild, setup-nuget libraries. Then we run the nuget restore to get all nuget package then build the application.
Note: I’ve not include tests as yet on this workflow, so I’ll leave that to the reader.
As usual we’ll want to create a badge, in the Actions tab in GitHub, select the workflow and on the right of the screen is a button Create status badge. Click this then press the Copy status badge Markdown button and this will place the Markdown into your clipboard. Here’s an example of mine
