November 16, 2017 Removing barriers to DevOps in the cloud Teams developing software for Apple devices have limited options when migrating to the cloud. Because such apps must be built on Macs, and because there are few cloud-hosted Mac offerings, many teams are forced to provide their own Mac hardware for CI/CD while the rest of their DevOps are hosted in the cloud. This adds cost, maintenance, and integration burdens that weigh down teams. Today, Microsoft announces free, cloud-hosted CI/CD agents on macOS as part of (VSTS). Available in preview, VSTS now supports building and releasing Apple apps in the cloud (including iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS), eliminating the need for providing and maintaining your own dedicated Mac hardware. Now that VSTS offers hosted CI/CD agents running on, it is a cloud DevOps solution for all client and web developers and teams of any size.
Transitioning to cloud-hosted CI/CD on macOS Our story on the VSTS CI team While most of our team’s DevOps assets and processes were in the cloud, we needed two on-premises Mac minis to build and release our open source. These Mac minis connected to VSTS and performed any of our builds that targeted macOS.
We kept these Macs in a corner of our team room. Most of the time, these Macs sat idle. We had to remember to regularly update them with macOS revisions, security patches, and new versions of tools and SDKs needed by our CI and CD. These were an administrative burden for our team when compared to the low maintenance of cloud-hosted Linux and Windows build agents. Last month, we rerouted our builds to the new VSTS cloud-hosted Mac agents. Since then, we haven’t had to think about the Mac minis.
Our Mac builds run smoothly in the cloud and we have access to the same logs, build artifacts, and machine capabilities that we had on-premises. Best of all, Microsoft keeps the OS, security patches, tools, and SDKs. All of this lets us deliver software faster. How to use VSTS cloud-hosted Mac agents for CI/CD To use the VSTS cloud-hosted Mac agents, it only takes one click.
Simply select Hosted macOS Preview for your build or release pipeline. The agents’ list of installed software can be found. The macOS image is shared by VSTS. It always includes recent versions of Xcode, CocoaPods, and fastlane, along with Android and Xamarin SDKs. If needed, you can install additional software with a script or a package management tool. What do you think?
I'd appreciate some help on the following. I have started a Xamarin Forms application using Prism Forms. I created the project in Visual Studio (Windows) using the Template Pack. Visual Studio for Mac. IOS blank project template. IOS templates. Visual Studio for Mac does not provide an Empty template. To load this controller in your application, and demonstrate the simple navigation, create a new instance of CustomViewController.
Cloud-hosted Mac agents have freed our team from administering dedicated Macs, allowing us to deliver software faster, and we anticipate them doing the same for you. To get started, check out the for Xcode and Xamarin. The VSTS extension for the Apple App Store can be from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
If you encounter any issues or have feedback, please tell us on the. We would appreciate hearing what you think. VSTS Mac agents are free for limited use. If you need more build time than supplied for free, or if you want concurrent builds, you can find pricing. Please be aware that during this preview, our Mac hardware is hosted in third party datacenters in the United States and your build and release data could cross geopolitical lines.
After each build completes, its macOS VM is reimaged, leaving no trace of your data on the agent. For more information, see. Our Mac datacenters will expand to other geographies soon.
We hope that VSTS cloud-hosted Mac agents will help your team. Thank you for trying them out. Hi, I switched our build plan from MacinCloud VSTS Agent to your hosted agents. 99% of the build succeeded then “MTOUCH: error MT4109: Failed to compile the generated registrar code.
Please file a bug report at Only difference I can see (in the logs) is MacinCloud has iOS 11 SDK whereas yours says something along the lines of “11.0 not found, using 11.1” A cursory Google yields all sorts of reasons for errors like this. I intend to troubleshoot further but just letting you know.
Thanks for the hard work delivering this feature. We have a bunch of Mac hardware running in data centers. Currently, in this preview, there are just two data centers, only in the United States, but we’ll expand. If you need to target a previous version of Xcode, we should always have the last 2 versions available on the agent (see the link to agent contents above). You can select the version you want in the VSTS Xcode build task.
We’ve talked about ways to make beta versions of Xcode available too, but haven’t gotten there yet. Right now, we have only one macOS VM image available, so there’s only one choice of OS version, though we’re anxiously exploring ways to expand that in ways compatible with our provisioner code that spins up and tears down agents on demand. I’m currently developing a cross-platform mobile app using C with Visual Studio 2017. To do so I’m running the vcremote service on a Mac as outlined in. Using vcremote I can pair my Visual Studio 2017 with the Mac that it is running on.
When building my C Visual Studio solution it just copies over the source to Mac, compiles it there and sends log/error messages back to the corresponding Visual Studio window. So, that means that the build gets triggered from within Visual Studio running on a Windows machine but for iOS gets executed on the Mac. As such, I would have to use a VSTS Windows build agent with Visual Studio that is coupled to a Mac. So, the approach is different from building a Xamarin based iOS app where I could directly target a Mac build agent.
Has any though been given on enabling the C based approach in the cloud? If not, would you consider this for the future?
Yes, you can use VSTS hosted Mac builds to run fastlane scripts. The hosted macOS build image has fastlane installed. When you configure the build in VSTS, enter the environment variables you need on the “Variables” tab.
Then, add the Shell Script task to the first build phase. Set the Shell Script task to use version “3.x (preview)” or later. Finally, enter the path to the fastlane script file in your Git repository, or select “Inline” and enter the script right into the build definition. You can set up continuous integration with your Git repository on the “Triggers” tab of the build definition. There is built-in support for VSTS Git, GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket Cloud, or any other Git repository.
More details are here.
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Vishal Garg Senior Quality Lead Manager Vishal Garg is working as a Sr. Quality Lead Manager with 3Pillar Global. He brings with him rich experience in the field of Quality Assurance with various domain’s knowledge e.g. Digital Media, Retail Banking, Finance and e-Governance. He has hands on experience in web automation, Mobile Automation, API automation, and Load Testing.
Prior to joining 3Pillar Global, he has been associated with reputed organizations like Birlasoft Ltd. And OSI (Open Solutions Inc.).