So as part of the Microservice project i’m creating myself, I thought I’d use Devops Pipelines for the build process. Having never gone in-depth with creating a pipeline, I thought it would be fairly straightforward. Not so!
My first problem that I came across was trying to pull my first branch into my development branch. I got this helpful error:
No hosted parallelism has been purchased or granted
Following the instructions, for a personal account, it turns out I needed to create a self hosted agent to do this.
I turned to docker, because a) i thought it would be simple, and b) because container-ism is something I’d like to get to know more.
so after following the instructions here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/docker?view=azure-devops
and here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/host-build-agent/
I was still struggling. My non-working pipeline yaml looked like this:
# ASP.NET Core
# Build and test ASP.NET Core projects targeting .NET Core.
# Add steps that run tests, create a NuGet package, deploy, and more:
# https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/languages/dotnet-core
trigger:
- development
pool:
vmImage: ubuntu-latest
variables:
buildConfiguration: 'Release'
steps:
- script: dotnet build --configuration $(buildConfiguration)
displayName: 'dotnet build $(buildConfiguration)'
why wasn’t it working? ah, the pool seems incorrect, so after seeing this bit of guidance on Stack Overflow:
I updated my yaml to this:
# ASP.NET Core
# Build and test ASP.NET Core projects targeting .NET Core.
# Add steps that run tests, create a NuGet package, deploy, and more:
# https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/languages/dotnet-core
trigger:
- development
pool:
name: DockerAgentPool
demands:
- agent.name -equals SelfHostedDockerAgent
variables:
buildConfiguration: 'Release'
steps:
- script: dotnet build --configuration $(buildConfiguration)
displayName: 'dotnet build $(buildConfiguration)'
- task: UseDotNet@2
displayName: 'Use .NET SDK 8.x'
inputs:
packageType: sdk
version: '8.x'
- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
displayName: 'Restore project dependencies'
inputs:
command: 'restore'
projects: '**/*.csproj'
- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
displayName: 'Build the project - Release'
inputs:
command: 'build'
arguments: '--no-restore --configuration Release'
projects: '**/*.csproj'but it still wasn’t working. It couldn’t file the csproj file to build. But of course it couldn’t because the csproj was still in the “initial checkin” branch from task 1 which could merge in because it was waiting for the pipeline to work.
In the end I had to comment out the dotnet build task and replace it with a simple echo Hello World task (because the pipeline required a script). This enabled the yaml fixes to go in and got the pipeline working.
I could then merge in the “initial checkin” branch and then finally update the yaml to include the tasks and scripts.
It now, so far, merges my branches in correctly! Woohoo!
On to the next part….