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In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll show you how to create a repo in GitHub that you can use with Azure DevTest Labs.
As we move more towards using declarative configuration technologies like Azure Resource Manager (ARM), PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC), and in the not too distant future Azure Stack for Windows Server 2016, I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that there’s now a pressing need to adopt, even if at a basic level, DevOps practices such as using git to manage code. See What is GitHub? on the Petri IT Knowledgebase for more information.
Create a new repository in GitHub (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
Once you start using templates and PowerShell scripts for server deployment and management, you also need to find a suitable way to manage and develop those scripts in collaboration with your colleagues. OneDrive and SharePoint are good solutions for working with Office documents, but don’t lend themselves to code development.
Push came to shove recently when I started to move my Azure VMs to DevTest Labs, a new feature that enables organizations to better manage lab environments in the cloud. Artifacts can be stored in Visual Studio Online (VSO) or GitHub repositories (repo) to allow developers to quickly deploy configurations to VMs, but while there’s a default public GitHub repo available with a selection of artifacts, I wanted to create my own artifact that runs a PowerShell script. And to do that you need your own repo.
Before starting, create a free account on GitHub. There are several different ways to create new GitHub repos, such as using GitHub for Windows and PowerShell, but to keep it as simple as possible, I’ll use the GitHub website.
Also bear in mind that free accounts can’t create private repos, so if keeping your code away from prying eyes is important, you might want to consider using a VSO Team Services repo instead, which I’ll cover in a later article.
Azure requires that artifacts be stored in a folder and not in the root directory of a repo branch. It’s important to understand that git doesn’t support empty folders, and while creating a folder is easy, it’s not intuitive.
Create a new file or folder in GitHub (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
Commit a file in GitHub (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
New repository in GitHub (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
In this article, I showed you how to create a public repo in GitHub and create a folder for use with Azure DevTest Labs artifact repositories.
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