GitHub and Azure Pipelines

A few weeks ago Microsoft announced that Visual Studio Team Services was being replaced/rebranded by a collection of services under the brand Azure DevOps. One of the services that make up Azure DevOps is Azure Pipelines which provides a platform for continuous integration and continuous delivery for a huge number of languages on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

As part of this change, Azure Pipelines is now available on the GitHub marketplace. In this post, I am going to pick one of my existing repos and see if I can get it building from GitHub using Azure Pipelines. I’m sure Microsoft or GitHub has documentation, but I’m attempting this without outside sources.

GitHub Marketplace

Make sure you have a GitHub account with a repo you want to build. For this post, I’m going to be using my ASP.NET Core Entity Framework repo. Now that you have the basic prep out of the way head over to the GitHub Marketplace and search for Azure Pipelines or click here.

Scroll to the bottom of the page to the Pricing and setup section. There is a paid option that is the default option. Click the Free option and then click Install it for free.

On the next page, you will get a summary of your order. Click the Complete order and begin installation button.

On the next page, you can select which repos to apply the installation to. For this post, I’m going to select a single repo. After making your choice on repos click the Install button.

Azure DevOps

After clicking install you will be thrown into the account authorization/creation process with Microsoft. After getting authorized you will get to the first set up in the setup process with Azure. You will need to select an organization and a project to continue. If you don’t have these setup yet there are options to create them.

After the process complete you will be land on the New pipeline creation process where you need to select the repo to use. Clicking the repo you want to use will move you to the next step.

The next step is a template selection. My sample is an ASP.NET Core application so I selected the ASP.NET Core template. Selecting a template will move you to the next step.

The next page will show you a yaml file based on the template you selected. Make any changes your project requires (my repo had two projects so I had to change the build to point to which project I wanted to build).

Next, you will be prompted to commit the yaml file to source control. Select your options and click Save and run.

After your configuration gets saved a build will be queued. If all goes well you will see your app being built. If everything works you will see something like this build results page.

Wrapping Up

GitHub and Microsoft have done a great job on this integration. I was surprised at how smooth the setup was. It was also neat to see a project that I created on Windows being built on Linux.

If you have a public repo on GitHub and need a way to build give Azure Pipelines a try.


Also published on Medium.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.