DevOps

GitHub: Use Actions to build ASP.NET Core Application

In this week’s post, we are going to use GitHub’s Actions to build one of the applications that we imported from an Azure DevOps Repo. The sample repo we are using can be found here.

Create an Action Workflow

From the repo in GitHub click the Actions option at the top center of the screen.

The Actions page will make suggestions based on the contents of the repo you are working with. In our case, the suggested .NET Core workflow is the one we are interested in. Click the Set up this workflow button.

The next screen that shows will be an editor loaded with the YAML for the .NET Core workflow we selected. For now, we are going to keep the YAML that was defaulted in and click the Start commit button. This workflow may or may not work for our repo at this point we are still exploring and can change as needed after we get a feel for how Actions work.

The next dialog is the commit details. For this initial change, we are going commit directly to master with the default commit message. Click Commit new file to continue.

View Workflow Status

Now that we have a workflow set up click on the Actions tab of the repo again to view the list of workflows and their status. As you can see in this screenshot the commit queued our new workflow to run.

The workflow finished quickly so I didn’t get to see the details while it was running, but if you click on commit title, Create dotnetcore.yml in this example, it will take you to the detail of this workflow run. From this view, you will see the jobs for the workflow listed on the left side of the screen, we only have one job which is the build. When you click on a job you will see the logs from that job. The following screenshot is the sample build job with the details of the build step expanded to show that both WebApp1 and WebApp2 were built.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully, this post will give you a good jumping-off point to create your own GitHub Actions. I was impressed with how easy it was to get started and the wide verity of languages supported especially for a feature set that has been out for less than a year. Check back in next week for more exploration of Actions.

GitHub: Import an Azure DevOps Repo

June 7, 2020 / DevOps, GitHub / DevOps, GitHub

Over the last couple of months, we have been exploring some of the features of Azure DevOps around Pipelines and Repos. I thought it would be interesting to see how the same type of setup and process might look using GitHub instead of Azure DevOps. I haven’t used GitHub other than for a basic repo before so I’m not sure how much of the Azure DevOps post will carry over, but we are going to find out. In this first post, we are going to import the repo we used in the Azure DevOps series from our Azure DevOps Repo.

Importing a Repo

To start in the project click the New button in the Repositories section of your GitHub dashboard.

On the next page click the Import a repository link.

The first thing the import process wants to know is the URL of our old repository. To get this we need to head over to our Azure DevOps Repo. Once in the Azure DevOps Repo click the Clone button.

When the dialog for clone shows you will see the URL, but before copying the URL hit the Generate Git Credentials button. This will create a username and password we will also need to enter when importing the repo at GitHub.

Here is the dialog after generating credentials.

Use the button next to the URL to copy URL and head back to GitHub and paste it into the URL box. Next, enter a name for the repo and click Begin import.

The following is the screen you will see next while GitHub works on the import. Since the repo we are importing from needs credentials it will fail after a couple of minutes and ask for a login and password. If you hit refresh it will prompt you immediately without having to wait.

Copy and paste the values we generated in Azure DevOps above into the Login and Password boxes and then click Submit.

The page will update when the process is complete. GitHub will also send you an email so don’t feel the need to keep the page open while the process is running.

GitHub Repo Cleanup

Now that our repo is in GitHub we can clean up some of the items that were specific to Azure DevOps. For the sample project, this would include the files that were used in/or defined our build pipeline. The following are the files that can be deleted.

azure-pipelines.yml
build.yml

Wrapping up

As you have seen the repo transition from Azure DevOps to GitHub is a simple process. I’m looking forward to exploring how GitHub handles some of the scenarios from the Azure DevOps series. I’m betting that GitHub has support for most of them especially since the introductions of Actions.

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