Quantcast
Channel: Visual Studio Team Services – Azure From The Trenches
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Publishing to GitHub Pages from Visual Studio Team Services

0
0

During the last major release of my commanding framework I wrote a lot of new documentation. I wrote this in Markdown and converted it to a documentation website using DocFX resulting in this website.

DocFX has a VSTS extension which make it easy to integrate into your build and release pipeline but I couldn’t find any simple way to publish it to GitHub Pages which is what I am using as a simple, and free, host. My initial solution was to use a short PowerShell script which took the following steps as part of a Release Plan:

  1. Clone the gh-pages branch from my repository into a folder
  2. Copy the output from the DocFX build artefact to the folder
  3. Commit the changes
  4. Push the branch to GitHub (which publishes the changes)

This worked nicely but it irked me not being able to do it in a more off the shelf manner and so I’ve tidied this up and released a VSTS Build and Release task to the marketplace. It come complete with documentation and hopefully it’s useful to people. The source code is available on GitHub.

Writing a simple VSTS build and release task is well documented and there are plenty of blog posts on the topic and so I won’t repeat that here but I did think it might be helpful to quickly cover just a couple of things that were often not covered.

Accessing Variables

I needed to find the default working folder within my task as I needed scratch space for cloning the gh-pages branch. VSTS exposes this as a built-in variable called System.DefaultWorkingDirectory – it’s a commonly used variable and you’ve probably seen it expressed as $(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory) when using tasks for releases.

You can access variables from within a script by using the Get-VstsTaskVariable cmdlet. For example:

$defaultWorkingDirectory = Get-VstsTaskVariable -Name 'System.DefaultWorkingDirectory'

Reporting Errors

You can write to the VSTS log using the Write-Host cmdlet but I wanted a nice red error message when things went wrong. You can do this by prefixing your message as shown below:

Write-Host "##vso[task.logissue type=error;]Your error message"

To exit the script and have it fail you need to exit with a non-zero return code and using a specific Exit method:

[Environment]::Exit(1)

 

And that’s it. As always I hope this is useful and I can be reached for discussion and questions on Twitter.

 

 


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images