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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Publishing apps to a Business Central Online Environment

There are 2 kinds of apps: AppSource Apps and Per Tenant Extensions (PTEs). These apps can be installed in two kinds of environments: Sandbox and Production. In Production, AppSource Apps are installed in the global scope and Per Tenant Extensions are installed in the Tenant Scope. In Sandbox environments you can also install apps to the development scope (like what VS Code does).

This blog post will describe how you can use BcContainerHelper 2.0.2 to install apps in any of those combinations.

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Having Demo Data while developing Business Central Apps with Docker

Update 2021/2/10: Microsoft stopped creating images for Docker in the summer of 2020. We now publish artifacts, which can be used to spin up containers and BcContainerHelper has replaced NavContainerHelper. This blog post reflects the old way of using NAV/BC on Docker and references NavContainerHelper, which is outdated.

I have always preached that you shouldn’t try to keep your Docker containers running. Containers should be something, which easily can be dismissed and recreated for any developer. One of the frequent questions is then: But what about my demo/development data? Continue reading

Publishing a New Base Application

Update 2021/2/10: Microsoft stopped creating images for Docker in the summer of 2020. We now publish artifacts, which can be used to spin up containers and BcContainerHelper has replaced NavContainerHelper. This blog post reflects the old way of using NAV/BC on Docker and references NavContainerHelper, which is outdated.

I think I have mentioned before, that I strongly recommend partners to use the extension model and create extensions, which can be published, installed and upgraded much easier then code customizations.

Having said that, I know that there are partners out there for who AL code customizations will be the right stepping stone towards adapting an extension model. Continue reading