Working with AL-Go for GitHub preview

If you want to have the latest updates of AL-Go for GitHub, you can update your repository and use https://github.com/microsoft/al-go-pte@preview or https://github.com/microsoft/al-go-appsource@preview as your template repository.

This means that you will get new updates before they are released. It also means that the actions you are using are instantly updated when we deploy a new version for preview and thus might be out of sync with your workflows.

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Deployment strategies and AL-Go for GitHub

When you are done developing your app, it needs to be deployed to your customers if it is a PTE or to AppSource if it is an AppSource app.

Currently we don’t have any automated way of publishing your app to AppSource – that is something we are working on and some day in the future, when it becomes possible, you will get a workflow in AL-Go for GitHub which handles this automatically.

This blog post will talk about PTEs, and what features are available in AL-Go for GitHub to assist you deploying your PTEs to customers.

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Branching strategies for your AL-Go for GitHub repo

If you teach yourself to follow a fairly simple set of rules, you will see that the health of your project will increase dramatically, and you will be in a better place with your project development.

So, I will at the ripe age of 56 bestow upon you these 5 rules, which can be applied to any project, using any DevOps setup. In the following I will explain how to implement these rules using AL-Go for GitHub:

  1. Use Pull Requests
  2. Use Code Reviews
  3. Use automated testing
  4. Use Feature branches
  5. Use Releases and release branches

Godspeed!

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Preview of future AL-Go for GitHub functionality

Like everything else these days, AL-Go for GitHub now also is available in a preview version, which you can install/apply and remove as you like. This allows you to get advantage of a bugfix or new functionality faster.

NOTE that when using the AL-Go preview version, you will have to update the AL-Go system files when you are told to, changes to the AL-Go actions might cause your version of the workflows to fail if not updated.

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Structuring your AL-Go for GitHub repositories

When developing apps for Business Central, you very frequently will have more than one app. You might split one customer specific app into multiple smaller apps or you might have a common app, which contains common functionality for all your customer specific or AppSource apps.

This blog post describes the thinking behind AL-Go for GitHub and how we recommend you setup your GitHub repository structure and why…

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Migrating to AL-Go for GitHub

As explained in the first blog post about AL-Go for GitHub the next post would be all about how to migrate your repository to AL-Go for GitHub.

Whether you have a setup based on the first CI/CD Hands-On-Lab or you have the latest generation, it should be fairly easy to migrate to AL-Go and get all the benefits with that, but it is a manual process.

The following scenarios are described in this post:

  1. From a CI/CD HOL based repo on GitHub
  2. From a CI/CD HOL based repo on Azure DevOps
  3. From GitHub (if you are “just” using it as a source code repository)
  4. From Azure DevOps (if you are “just” using it as a source code repository)
  5. From nothing (if you just have the source code on your laptop)
  6. From nothing (if you just have some .app files, but not the source code)

Last, but not least there are some common questions you need to consider when using any DevOps setup really.

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AL-Go for GitHub

It has been a while since my last blog post and the reason behind this is quite simple: I have been busy. Busy creating AL-Go for GitHub.

AL-Go for GitHub is plug-and-play DevOps for Business Central PTEs or AppSource apps on GitHub. A tool, which does NOT require you to modify PowerShell scripts, change .yaml workflows or pipelines, but still allows you to setup and maintain full DevOps for your Business Central projects with a click of a button.

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