Earlier this year I published a pre-release version of an Azure DevOps extension that wrapped the ApkTool for extracting and re-packing Android APK files. Having spent more time working with Azure Pipelines, I realised that most of what I was doing with the extension could actually be done with one or more templates. Today I started the process of creating the templates… and unfortunately got side tracked in over engineering a couple of the templates. The upshot is that the Pipeline Templates library now has the following new templates (there’s no release yet but you can reference them off the master branch if you want to use them today).
- Download-Url-To-File – As the name suggests this template can be used to download a url (source_url) to a specified file (target_path). The target_path parameter can be an absolute or relative path, and you can specify the overwrite_existing parameter if you want to force the url to be downloaded even if the file already exists.
- Check-File-Exists – Again, the name says what’s in the box – this template checks to see if the specified file (path_to_check) exists. The response can either be an output variable (specified using the file_exists_variable parameter) or an error can be thrown (which will break the current build)
- Download-And-Cache – Rather than having to download files every time a build is run, the files can be cached and reloaded for each build. This template makes this easy.
- ApkTool-Install – This downloads and caches the two files required to run the apktool (apktool.jar and apktool.bat) on Windows.
Once I get to the point where I’m able to replicate the functionality of the Apktool extension I’ll publish these updates as a new release. In meantime, if there are any other templates you’d like to see, feel free to create an issue on the Pipeline Templates GitHub repo, or drop me a comment