Devops pipeline for V4.30

Given that the 4.3 release is imminent, I plan on documenting my progress for converting my 4.0 pipeline to 4.3 here. It may offer suggestions and help to others, so thought it would help...

I have not worked on nop-commerce in a while so my build pipeline is out of date...

I am not sure why the nop team chose Travis over AzurePipelines, but I am guessing many users would want to deploy to AzureDevops (like we do)...

First of all, I have generated adjusted the pipeline that generates the build YAML:

pool:
  name: Azure Pipelines
steps:
- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
  displayName: 'dotnet restore'
  inputs:
    command: restore
    projects: ./src/NopCommerce.sln
- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
  displayName: 'dotnet build'
  inputs:
    projects: ./src/NopCommerce.sln
    arguments: '--configuration $(BuildConfiguration)'
- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
  displayName: 'dotnet test'
  inputs:
    command: test
    projects: |
     ./src/Tests/Nop.Core.Tests/Nop.Core.Tests.csproj
     ./src/Tests/Nop.Web.MVC.Tests/Nop.Web.MVC.Tests.csproj
     ./src/Tests/Nop.Services.Tests/Nop.Services.Tests.csproj
    arguments: '--configuration $(BuildConfiguration) --collect "Code coverage"'
- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
  displayName: 'dotnet publish'
  inputs:
    command: publish
    arguments: '--configuration $(BuildConfiguration) --output $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)'
- task: PublishBuildArtifacts@1
  displayName: 'Publish Artifact'
  inputs:
    ArtifactName: '$(Parameters.ArtifactName)'

something like this could be added to the file  

azure-pipelines.yml

in root of the project if using a private GitHub account connected to Azure DevOps (VisualStudio Online) build pipeline.

I plan on looking at making code coverage work in the interface soon and  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60893419/azure-devops-code-coverage-for-net-core-3-1 seems to show the way. I will update the above if required...

Next will be the release pipeline...

Release pipeline info will be here.

First problem to overcome is whether to have a template of App_Data\dataSettings.json deployed so that predefined vars can be automatically populate them. Previously I did this by updating the original source, however I now feel that this should be generated by the build pipeline... :thinking!

Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to deploy using the azure devops release process without adding a template of

App_Data/dataSettings.json

because a transform can only happen on deploy which is already a zip file (so a script process cannot be used to generate it on the fly). Shame... I have added it to the bugs thread but not hopeful that it will make it into the 4.3 release. A work around will be to branch the official repo and add it separately (as I did previously) but far from ideal...

For my own reference, and also hoping that the core dev team take note, I have created the following blog posts!

https://networkfusion.wordpress.com/2020/05/19/nopcommerce-4-3-build-pipeline-on-visualstudio-online-azure-devops-vsts/
and
https://networkfusion.wordpress.com/2020/05/19/nopcommerce-4-3-build-pipeline-on-visualstudio-online-azure-devops-with-code-coverage/

This is a great post and really helpful. Thanks for sharing.
It's unfortunate that there isn't more of this sort of help in this community.