appveyor is a CI service for Windows. As travis doesn’t support Windows, so appveyor is a good choice for Windows CI service. This article will describe how to integrate appveyor for a public github respository, and record some PowerShell script when integrating appveyor into cocos2d-x.

It is easy to integrate appveyor into a public github repo, the steps are:

Now your github repo should have appveyor service integrated. It is easy, but it is just a start point, you should do some useful things when there is a new pull request sent to the repo, or a new commit is added into an existing pull request.

appveyor provides two ways to generate build configuration, using UI or appveyor.yml. I prefer to use appveyor.xml, but i usually use UI configuration then click Export YAML in project settings to export the content of appveyor.xml. It is useful if you don’t know how to write the configuration in appveyor.xml.

Following are some tips of appveyor.xml:

  • disable two builds for a pull request

    by default, appveyor will trigger two builds when a pull request is sent, can use the configuration to disable it

    skip_branch_with_pr: true

  • disable builds when a tag is created

    skip_tags: true

  • use powershell script to do something before build and build

    before_build:
    - ps: xxx.ps1
    
build_script:
    - ps: yyy.ps1

I am not powershell script expert, so met many issues when writing powershell script. Following are some tips about powershell script:

  • & is call operator used to invoke external commands, such as & pip install xxx
  • use Write-Host function to output usefull message
  • use $env:XXX to refer to XXX environment variables, such as $env:APPVEYOR_BUILD_FOLDER
  • use Copy-Item -Path xxx -Destination yyy -Recurse to copy contents of a folder to another folder, -Recurse is important to copy subfolders content
  • Use Push-Location and Pop-Location to change working directory, similar to pushd, popd in linux