Introduction

This is a simple pipeline example for a .NET Core application, showing just how easy it is to get up and running with .NET development using GitLab.

Reference links

• GitLab CI Documentation
• .NET Hello World tutorial

If you're new to .NET you'll want to check out the tutorial, but if you're already a seasoned developer considering building your own .NET app with GitLab, this should all look very familiar.

What's contained in this project

The root of the repository contains the out of the dotnet new console command, which generates a new console application that just prints out "Hello, World." It's a simple example, but great for demonstrating how easy GitLab CI is to use with .NET. Check out the Program.cs and dotnetcore.csproj files to see how these work.

In addition to the .NET Core content, there is a ready-to-go .gitignore file sourced from the the .NET Core .gitignore. This will help keep your repository clean of build files and other configuration.

Finally, the .gitlab-ci.yml contains the configuration needed for GitLab to build your code. Let's take a look, section by section.

First, we note that we want to use the official Microsoft .NET SDK image to build our project.

image: microsoft/dotnet:latest

We're defining two stages here: build, and test. As your project grows in complexity you can add more of these.

stages:
    - build
    - test

Next, we define our build job which simply runs the dotnet build command and identifies the bin folder as the output directory. Anything in the bin folder will be automatically handed off to future stages, and is also downloadable through the web UI.

build:
    stage: build
    script:
        - "dotnet build"
    artifacts:
      paths:
        - bin/

Similar to the build step, we get our test output simply by running dotnet test.

test:
    stage: test
    script: 
        - "dotnet test"

This should be enough to get you started. There are many, many powerful options for your .gitlab-ci.yml. You can read about them in our documentation here.

Developing with Gitpod

This template repository also has a fully-automated dev setup for Gitpod.

The .gitpod.yml ensures that, when you open this repository in Gitpod, you'll get a cloud workspace with .NET Core pre-installed, and your project will automatically be built and start running.