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.

Originally published at Eric L. Anderson.