[Question]:Guidance on Scheduling Production Deployments and Managing Multi-Project Setup in GitHub AL-Go

[DozUmesh]

Question

I’m currently using GitHub AL-Go to manage CICD for Business Central extensions and need assistance with two key areas:

1. Scheduling a Deployment to Production
   How can I schedule a production deployment to trigger automatically once a new release is available?

2. Handling a Multi-Project Setup
   I reviewed this guide but still have questions about managing a setup with:

• One base app.
• Two country-specific extensions (e.g., US and DK).

Specifically, I’m unsure about:

• Whether the base app should sit in W1 or be duplicated in both US and DK projects.
• The workflow for deploying to QA.
• The process for deploying to production.

Could you provide guidance on these aspects?

[freddydk]

on 1. - this is not supported out-of-the-box yet. Currently you will have to run the Publish to Environment after creating a release. It is also not supported to schedule this deployment at this time. Both these things are something we are debating on how we solve this in the best way.

on 2. - this repo: https://github.com/businesscentralapps/buildorder shows how we envision this. I have a Common and a Misc project, in which we can have some apps - then there is a W1 project with the W1 version and an DK and IT project with the Danish and Italian version. UseProjectDependencies is true for AL-Go to build apps in the right order.

It is also possible to place your source code in seperate folders and then create AL-Go projects, which references the apps you want to build (https://github.com/microsoft/BCApps uses this approach) - this means that the same AL app can be build in different AL-Go projects.

On deployments to QA and PROD - current recommendation is to setup CD to QA and deploy manually to PROD.

[freddydk]

If you want to create a schedule for running PublishToEnvironment, what you would need to do currently is to create a new .yaml file in the .github/workflows folder in your repository with the following content:

f.ex. .github/workflows/PublishToProd.yaml

name: 'PublishToProd'

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 20 * * 5"

env:
  appVersion: 'Current'
  environmentName: 'PROD'

jobs:
  Initialization:
    runs-on: [ ubuntu-latest ]
    steps:
      - name: Trigger Publish To Environment
        uses: octokit/[email protected]
        with:
          route: POST /repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/workflows/{workflow_id}/dispatches
          owner: ${{ github.repository_owner }}
          repo: ${{ github.event.repository.name }}
          workflow_id: PublishToEnvironment.yaml
          ref: main
          inputs: '{"appVersion": ${{ env.appVersion }}, "environmentName": ${{ env.environmentName}} }'
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GHTOKENWORKFLOW }}

This workflow will run every friday evening at 20:00 (8PM) and deploy the Current (which is the latest released bits) to the PROD environment.
By changing the CRON tab or the appVersion / environmentName environment variables - you can modify the behavior.

You need a working GHTOKENWORKFLOW PAT secret for this workflow to work.