Visual Studio Mobile Center: Solving a Problem with Package Restore

Visual Studio Mobile Center is shaping up to be a great tool. Where before it had taken me a week to set up the builds in VSTS it now takes less than an hour. This speed and simplicity does come at a cost, mostly in terms of not having a lot of fine control over the build process. About a month ago this caused a problem for me.

I don't have full control of a repository I was trying to build using VSMC. That is to say the QA group added a directory with their test solutions. This was fine except that test solution required a Nuget package that was hosted on our company's internal Nuget server. Why was this a problem? Because VSMC will try and restore packages for any and all solutions it finds in the repository, even ones I'm not trying to build with VSMC and that meant the package restore step failed every time.

Luckily about the time this happened, VSMC implemented a feature I (and probably others) have been asking for. The ability to create custom build steps. There are three custom scripts that can be added, one right after the source code is retrieved (post-clone), one right before the solution is built (pre-build) and one right after the solution has been built (post-build). For Android and iOS apps the build happens on a Mac so bash scripts need to be made, for UWP apps the build happens on a Windows machine so Powershell scripts are needed. For more information you can check out their easy to read documentation:

VSMC Build Scripts

How does this help me and my error? Well as it turns out I can create a post-clone script that deletes the test project folder out of the cloned repository *BEFORE* the Nuget package restore happens. I don't need anything in there so no problem removing it. For my particular case I am doing Xamarin iOS and Android builds. That means I need to create a Bash script.

The script must be a specific name, mobile-center-post-clone.sh for a post clone shell script. It also has to be in the same directory as the solution or project to build. Because the solution that built my iOS project and the project for the Android application were in different locations, I needed two copies of this same script.

Here is the script I created:

 #!/usr/bin/env bash  
 echo “removing test automation directory”  
 set -e  
 rm -rf $MOBILECENTER_SOURCE_DIRECTORY/testAutomation  

The most important line in the script is the last one. It removes the entire directory from the build server where the QA project resides that is causing the problem. Notice that I am also using one of the built in build variables, $MOBILECENTER_SOURCE_DIRECTORY. This inserts the location of the root directory where the source code was copied to. It allows my script to work anywhere so I can use the same one for the iOS build and the Android build. It works like a charm.

Note: You may have to re-save your build configuration before it picks up that the scripts are there. The above picture shows that the build definition has detected my post-clone script.

That's it. If you are having issues with the Nuget restore step on a project you are not trying to build, you can just remove it using such a script. You could also do things with scrips like running UI tests after the build or changing the app Ids before the build. This is a great addition to Visual Studio Mobile Center.