A few days layer ...

Not only does AppVeyor gives us continuous integration, it can give us continuous delivery as well.

So after getting the newly migrated MapGuide Maestro on GitHub hooked up to AppVeyor for CI and automated publishing of code coverage results to Coveralls, I wanted to look at how AppVeyor can be used for automating the creation of GitHub releases. The ideal scenario, is that when I decide to put out a release, I hit some button or run some command and a new GitHub release will show up a few minutes later.

It turns out, AppVeyor has a whole section on their documentation dedicated to this very subject! Some tweaks were required to the AppVeyor build system so that it also builds the API/User documentation and zip/installer packages and then by specifying these artifacts in the artifacts section of appveyor.yml, they will appear in the artifacts section of the AppVeyor build page.

What that means is that you now have access to the latest builds of MapGuide Maestro straight after AppVeyor builds and validates them. However, this is not the way I want you to access official releases of Maestro, I still want GitHub releases created for this particular case, and ideally in an automated fashion.

This is where we set up our AppVeyor configuration to deploy using the GitHub deployment provider, with the trigger being a push of a git tag. What this means in practice is when I decide to put out an official release, I make the release tag in Git, push it out to GitHub. This triggers AppVeyor to do its usual CI and artifact packaging. But because this is a release tag, it will also automatically create a corresponding GitHub release in a draft state and uploads the associated artifacts of this build with it.

From there, I can visit the draft release page and tidy up the release description and add release notes, click the publish button and voila! A new release is ready for you to download. How well is this automated process? Check out this test release and find out for yourself.

I'm really liking this well-oiled CI/CD machine, further solidifying my justification for making the move to GitHub in the first place. Oh, and as the above screenshot shows, I also got my first pull request today for Maestro too. Things are looking up!