Guido runs a great site called pcf.gallery where there are over 200+ PCF components. The components on the site are hosted on GitHub and have solutions that can be installed on CDS. Some components have managed solution, some have unmanaged, and some have both. Since lot of the components are open-source and are hosted in GitHub, I thought it would be good to automate this using GitHub Actions and ensure every component has both managed and unmanaged solutions.

GitHub Actions is similar to Azure DevOps. If you want to know more about GitHub Actions and how it compares to Azure DevOps, listen to DevOps and GitHub Actions with Edward Thomson on Hanselminutes. I created a starter repo with a workflow yml that anyone can use in their PCF repo hosted on GitHub. You can access this repo on https://github.com/rajyraman/pcf-actions-starter

In order to use this workflow on your repo do these steps:

1. Clone this repo and copy the .github folder from the cloned repo into the root of your repo.
2. Update the msbuildtarget environment variable on the yml to point to the folder with the “Other” folder. This folder would have been created when you ran the “pac solution init” command.
3. The “Other” folder will have the xml files that will be packaged up into the solution.
4. Make sure that you update the value for “SolutionPackageType” on your cdsproj file to “Both”, so that the Solution Packager can build both Managed and Unmanaged Solutions.

Once you make these changes commit the changes to your repo. The build command will run everytime you commit something to the repo. You can download the managed and unmanaged solutions from the artifact area on the build.

Once you are ready to release the solutions, tag the commit using “git tag”. If the tag is in this format: v* e.g. v1.0, v.1.0.0 etc., the workflow will run the Release steps, which will create a new release and add both the managed and unmanaged solutions to the release.

Both the Solution Name and the Solution Version will be picked up from the Solution.xml file, so as you release new versions, make sure you update this information on the file.

I hope this makes it little easier to automate your PCF builds and releases on GitHub.