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GitHub Actions

Applies to
Windows
MacOS
Linux

This section assumes you have a basic knowledge of GitHub Actions. You can learn more about creating workflows here.

Creating the Workflow​

The following example assumes you are building for Windows, but you can adapt the workflow for other platforms as well.

First create a workflow in your repository at .github/workflows with the .yml extension, for example .github/workflows/main.yml. This example workflow will run when code is pushed to the main branch. Refer to documentation linked above if you would prefer a different trigger.

name: Deploy to GitHub Releases

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

Create the job that will run when the trigger is activated. This example will run on a windows-latest machine as we're packaging for Windows.

jobs:
  deploy-to-github-releases:
    runs-on: windows-latest
    steps:

Compiling the Application​

First, add a step to checkout your repository to get all the files needed to compile your application.

      - name: Checkout Repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

You will need the version number of your release for packing with Velopack. There are many ways to handle this. If you are using GitHub Action variables to handle this, you can skip this step. This example will extract the version number from the <Version> tag in the .csproj of the application. The bash shell is defined here as this command will fail when running on Windows otherwise. The command works by using a regular expression with grep to extract the value between <Version> and </Version> in the csproj file, and store it in a variable called version in the current run of the workflow.

      - name: Get Version from Project File
        id: get-version
        shell: bash
        run: echo "version=$(grep -oE '<Version>[^<]+' MyApplication/MyApplication.csproj | sed 's/<Version>//')" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT

Next, add a step to install .NET so the application can be compiled. Set the dotnet-version to the version needed by your application.

      - name: Install .NET
        uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v4
        with:
          dotnet-version: 8.0.x

Compile your application. This example will do so by publishing the application to a folder in a self-contained manner. You can publish without the self-contained flag if using Velopack to install such dependencies (see Bootstrapping for details). This command uses the -c flag to set the build configuration to Release mode, -o to set the output directory to publish, -r to set the runtime to win-x64 for distributing on 64-bit Windows, and --self-contained to publish the .NET runtime with the application. Adapt this command to your needs. You can learn more about dotnet publish in the Microsoft Documentation.

      - name: Publish Application
        run: dotnet publish MyProject/MyProject.csproj -c Release -o publish -r win-x64 --self-contained true

Deploying the Release​

Finally, use Velopack to package your application and deploy your release. Create a step that runs several commands on the commandline.

Let's break down what each line does.

  1. Installs the Velopack CLI.
  2. Downloads the latest release of your repository. This is needed so that Velopack can create the delta package between the current release and the new one, as well as populating the releases files.
  3. Invokes the Velopack CLI to package your application. The -v argument calls upon the version variable assigned earlier, which is accessed using the id of the step that assigned it (get-version). -p is pointed at the publish directory that was used in the previous step. For more information on the Velopack CLI and which flags are available for the pack command, see here.
  4. Creates a new release in your repository and uploads the necessary files to it automatically.
tip

If your repository is private, you will need to provide Velopack with an OAuth token when using the vpk download and vpk upload commands. Simply append the following to both commands: --token ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}.

      - name: Create Velopack Release
        run: |
          dotnet tool install -g vpk
          vpk download github --repoUrl https://github.com/Myname/Myrepo
          vpk pack -u MyUniqueIdentifier -v ${{ steps.get-version.outputs.version }} -p publish
          vpk upload github --repoUrl https://github.com/Myname/Myrepo --publish --releaseName "MyProject ${{ steps.get-version.outputs.version }}" --tag v${{ steps.get-version.outputs.version }}