When deploying a release to AppCenter you can specify release notes that get presented to the user when they go to download a new release. This week a question was asked as to how to specify release notes from a file when submitting a new app version to AppCenter.
If you looked at the complete example I provided for building and deploying a Uno app to Android, iOS and Windows, you might be wondering how you can provide release notes at all since we didn’t specify any release notes when we used the AppCenter deploy template. However, if you take a look at the parameters list you can see that there is an appcenter_release_notes parameter which has a default value set. Use this parameter if you want to specify the release notes inline when invoking the template.
In the v0.5.1 release we added two new parameters that allow you to specify a file for release notes to be taken from: appcenter_release_notes_option and appcenter_release_notes_file. To specify a file for release notes, you first need to set the appcenter_release_notes_option parameter to file. Then you need to use the appcenter_release_notes_file parameter to specify the file that you want to use.
In theory this sounds easy: you add a release notes file to your repository and then simply provide a relative path to the file in the appcenter_release_notes_file parameter. This you will find does not work!!! The AppCenter deploy template does not know anything about your source code repository, since it’s designed to deploy the artifacts from a prior build stage.
Ok, so then the question is, how do we make the release notes file available to the AppCenter template? Well we pretty much answered that in the previous paragraph – you need to deploy it as an artifact from the build process.
Assuming you’re using one of the build templates from https://pipelinetemplates.com, you can easily do this by adding additional steps as part of the prePublish extension point. Here’s an example:
- template: azure/mobile/build-xamarin-ios.yml@builttoroam_templates
parameters:
# Stage name and whether it's enabled
stage_name: 'Build_iOS'
build_ios_enabled: $(ios_enabled)
# Version information
full_version_number: '$(version_prefix).$(Build.BuildId)'
# Solution to build
solution_filename: $(solution_file)
solution_build_configuration: $(solution_build_config)
# Signing information
ios_plist_filename: 'src/Apps/DotNet/Uno/InspectorUno/InspectorUno/InspectorUno.iOS/Info.plist'
ios_cert_password: '$(ios_signing_certificate_password)'
ios_cert_securefiles_filename: '$(ios_signing_certificate_securefiles_filename)'
ios_provisioning_profile_securefiles_filename: '$(ios_provisioning_profile_securefiles_filename)'
# Output information
artifact_folder: $(artifact_ios_folder)
application_package: $(ios_application_package)
prePublish:
- task: CopyFiles@2
displayName: 'Copying release notes'
inputs:
contents: 'src/Apps/DotNet/releasenotes.txt'
targetFolder: '$(build.artifactStagingDirectory)/$(artifact_ios_folder)'
flattenFolders: true
overWrite: true
- template: azure/mobile/deploy-appcenter.yml@builttoroam_templates
parameters:
# Stage name and dependencies
stage_name: 'Deploy_iOS'
depends_on: 'Build_iOS'
deploy_appcenter_enabled: $(ios_enabled)
environment_name: $(appcenter_environment)
# Build artifacts
artifact_folder: $(artifact_ios_folder)
application_package: $(ios_application_package)
# Deployment to AppCenter
appcenter_service_connection: $(appcenter_service_connection)
appcenter_organisation: $(appcenter_organisation)
appcenter_applicationid: $(appcenter_ios_appid)
appcenter_distribution_group_ids: '5174f212-ea8c-4df1-b159-391200d7af5f'
appcenter_release_notes_option: file
appcenter_release_notes_file: 'releasenotes.txt'
Note that the CopyFiles task copies the release notes into the artifact_folder sub-folder of the staging directory. This is important because the AppCenter deploy template will look in the sub-folder for the release notes file specified using the appcenter_release_notes_file parameter.