Summary
Great work! You covered a lot of ground in this module. You and the team have come a long way in creating an automated pipeline. You learned how to map script commands on a build server to automated pipeline tasks that run when you push code to GitHub. The result of the pipeline is a .zip file that contains the built Space Game web app.
Along the way, you learned how to use variables to simplify your code.
You also learned how to use templates to encapsulate sets of tasks that you can repeat throughout your build process. You used a template to build the app's Debug and Release configurations.
Lastly, you practiced your Git skills by pushing commits to a branch and building from that branch. Working from a branch lets you work in isolation from the main code base. That helps you experiment and try new things without affecting the main development branch, main.
Keep in mind that this build configuration focuses on building a .NET app. The tasks you choose will depend on the kind of app you're building, the tools you use to build it, and the programming language in which it's written.
When you approach your own builds, it's a good idea to start by making sure you can build the app from scratch from the terminal or from a Bash or PowerShell script. From there, you can map each command to a pipeline task that accomplishes the same thing.
When you create your own pipeline, you have two choices: the visual designer or YAML files. If you choose the visual designer to get started, you can switch to the YAML version of your configuration to learn how each task is structured.
Note
At this point, you have a build artifact that you could deploy to a QA or production environment. For the rest of this learning path, you'll focus on using Azure Pipelines to build and test your software. You'll learn how to use Azure Pipelines to deploy your apps in a future learning path.
Additional resources
To further your understanding, see the following additional resources:
If you're looking for a more academic approach, Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley is a great starting point.
Learn YAML
If you're interested in learning YAML, check out Learn YAML in Y minutes. You can then review the Azure Pipelines YAML schema reference to get a better sense of how pipelines are structured.
Explore the documentation
We provide complete reference documentation that goes deeper into the concepts and tasks we described here. The documentation also provides starter guides for many app types, like Java, C++, and Node.js.
The Build and release tasks section can help you map your existing build commands to built-in tasks.
Create your own build pipeline
In this module, you created the pipeline from Azure DevOps. You can repeat a similar process to create your own pipeline. You can also create a pipeline from the GitHub Marketplace app.