Continuous Integration & Delivery with Xamarin - Getting Started with Bitrise.io

This is the third post on the series Continuous Integration & Delivery with Xamarin. In our last post we discussed what we were going to build.

In this post we are going to

• Setup a Bitrise.io account
• Perform our first build with Bitrise.io
   

What is Bitrise.io?

Bitrise.io is an online continuous and mobile delivery service that gets your source code from your repository into a brand new virtual machine for each build - basically a Phoenix server for your mobile builds.

This means that your builds are very reliable and won't suffer from the "it works on my machine" syndrome. Setup is a breeze and you can have your first build up and running literally in minutes.

Lets Get Started

1. Head over to Bitrise.io to signup for an account
   
2. Connect Bitrise.io to your source control provider (eg BitBucket, Github, etc) and select the forked Todo repository from one of your accounts.
   
3. Secure access to your repository. Bitrise.io will generate an SSH Keypair for you. Click the "Auto-add this key" to add it to your repository.
   
4. Make sure you have administrative access to your forked version of the Todo repository
   
5. Select a default branch from the repository - typically master
   
6. Selecting a branch will validate your repository. You should see a pretty cool web-based console window show up.
   
7. Once your repository has been validated it will provide a list of platforms - it should detect that your repository contains a Xamarin project. Go ahead and select Xamarin and select the master branch.
   
8. Bitrise.io will display available Xamarin solutions - select the TodoPCL.sln
   
9. Select the Ad-Hoc|iPhone build configuration
   
10. Enter your Xamarin account credentials - this checks your available Xamarin licenses.
11. Setup your webhook by clicking the "Register a webhook for me" button - this makes sure when your repository is pushed; it will trigger a build in Bitrise.io
    
12. Your webhook is setup and you are now ready to perform your first build - click "Your awesome app is ready to roll!"
    
13. This leads you to your app dashboard. Click the "Start your Build" button
    
14. This will display a Build trigger dialog - defaulted to build your default branch using the default workflow created by Bitrise.io
    
15. The build console will appear displaying the results of your first build
    
16. Bummer - your first build failed.
    

Now the build failure is not a bad thing. In this case it is because we don't have any iOS code signing keys.

I mentioned you would perform your first build - I did not mention if it would pass (yeah - sneaky).

Don't worry in our next post we will work on setting up our app correctly so we don't have this code signing issue and other issues for that matter.