In a previous post I discussed starting to create a Visual Studio Extension for BuildLight.
It would be nice to automate new versions to the marketplace.
There are a number or articles on-line showing how to do this with ADO but I wanted to keep all the code and CI/CD in the same GitHub Repo of BuildLight.
I started looking into how to deploy a VSIX to the Marketplace and came across a very recent blog post CI/CD for Visual Studio extensions with GitHub Actions from David Gardiner which I'm looking forward to reading when more are released but kindly the GH Action is already available in a repo VsShowMissing.
So my journey began.
I created an account on the marketplace and added the necessary details:
Then I created a simple VSIX and uploaded it to my own repo and added David's publish.yml. There's a GHA main.yml in .github\workflows for pushing a new build to GH Releases but I'll look at that later. For now I'm happy to just manually building the vsix locally and when I upload to GH Releases the GHA can trigger and publish on the marketplace.
Looking through the publish.yml a few places would need to be updated for filenames and paths. I added an Overview.md and the build\extension-manifest.json file, with updates.
During my testing it doesn't seem like any updates to the Overview.md are being reflected on the marketplace listing. The image didn't upload either. But new versions of the vsix did get uploaded.
One thing you need to create is a PAT or Personal Access Token. But where do you create this?
I couldn't find anything specific to a Visual Studio Marketplace extension but there are other articles for VSCode
Make sure when you create one:
make it accessible to every organization
Click on "Show all scopes" and scroll down to the Marketplace section and tick all:
[✔] Read [✔] Acquire [✔] Publish [✔] Manage
Save this token.
In the Repo create a new Secret on the Settings tab, Secrets section, click "New secret" and call it PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN .
This matches the example from the Download Assets (Code) Action.
Make sure this is the same name in your publish.yml: ${ secrets.PersonalAccessToken } (This will be double { and }).
Now just create a new release and watch the GHA run and upload your extension to the marketplace.