对来自不同 Git 存储库的项目使用 VSTS 持续集成管道

Question

I have this particiular setup that I would like to include into VSTS and continous integration + continous deployment. For the sake of simplicity, I'll reduce my situation to the following setup:

I have two solutions, A and B, which are in individual Git repositories. One project A1 of solution A references a project B1 of solution B. Since this is a simplified case for demonstration purposes, let's assume that the Git repositories can not be merged!

Right now, I'm setting up CI for project A1. The project's build obviously fails since the dependencies to B1 can't be resolved.

So far I've googled two solutions for my case which both make me unhappy:

• Option 1) All references that can't be resolved by NuGet should be added to a library folder, see How to properly check in DLLs/assemblies to TFS/Visual Studio Team Services (was VSO) I might agree with this option in cases where these are third party dependencies that rarely change, like twice a year. However, since I compile B1 myself (and I might do that often), I dislike this solution. Granted, I could automatically copy the binaries from B1 into A1/lib after B1's build, but I'd like to avoid checking in the binaries of B1.
• Option 2) Use NuGet for every reference that I want to integrate. I know that I can set up my own local NuGet server. I'm not sure about hosted solutions solutions with 'private packages'. Using Nuget for this seems like an overkill since I develop A1 and B1 locally and for every local build of B1 I'd have to push a new version and update the packages from A1 before updates are passed through to A1. Right now, I can build B1 locally and A1 immediately sees the updates. Let's assume I have a lot of development builds locally, I essentially don't want to push 50+/100+ builds for B1 each day.

I will also set up a CI pipeline for B1 in VSTS.

I guess I'm looking for a way to using a "reference path" for VSTS to look for dependencies that I build from another CI pipeline. Is there a sort of shared "bin" space for VSTS projects? Before A1's build, I would automatically copy the built binary from B1 to A1.

Is there any good way to achieve this? Right now I'm thinking about a post/pre-build FTP/cloud push/pull solution but given my situation (dependencies over different Git repositories) should be pretty common, what is the solution?

Answer 1

If you do not want to manage the projectB1 by NuGet package, there has other options you can use.

Assume solutionB is managed in repoB and file structure in repoB look like:

repoB
  |___solutionB
           |___projectB1
                    |___...
           |___...
  |___...

Option 1: clone repoB during build directly

At the beginning of your build definition, you can add a PowerShell task to clone repo. The PowerShell script as below:

# If you are using private agent to build and clean source is false, you should check if the repoB folder exist or not
git clone https://Personal%20Access%20Token:{PAT}@{account}.visualstudio.com/{project}/_git/repoB

To make sure solutionB build firstly, you can use two VS build task. The firstly one used for building solutionB ( repoB/*.sln ), and the second one used for building solutionA ( **/solutionA.sln ).

Option 2: add repoB as submodule for repoA

If you want to add repoB as submodule for repoA , then you can add repoB as submodule for repoA by:

git submodule add https://{account}.visualstudio.com/{project}/_git/repoB

Then commit and push the changes to remote repoA .

Note: you also need to added another VS Build task to build solutionB firstly,.

Option 3: add repoB's branch (such as master branch) as subtree for repoA

Similar as submoodule, you can add a branch (such as master ) of repoB into repoA by:

git subtree add --prefix=repoB https://{account}.visualstudio.com/{project}/_git/repoB master