All 16 CI/CD, Publishing & Deployment questions
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What is the typical CI/CD pipeline structure for a .NET application? What is the difference between continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment/delivery (CD)? How do you securely manage secrets (connection strings, API keys) in a CI/CD pipeline without committing them to source control? What is the purpose of separate build and release pipelines (or stages), and why shouldn't you rebuild the application for each deployment environment? What is the role of automated smoke tests and health checks immediately after a deployment completes? How do you version and tag Docker images for a .NET application as part of a CI/CD pipeline? How do feature flags decouple code deployment from feature release in a CI/CD workflow? What is the difference between dotnet publish's --self-contained and framework-dependent options in the context of container image builds? What is the difference between blue-green deployment and canary deployment, and how do they apply to .NET applications? How do you set up automated database migrations as part of a .NET CI/CD deployment pipeline safely?
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.NET › CI/CD, Publishing & Deployment

How do you configure a GitHub Actions workflow to build, test, and publish a .NET application?

Intermediate

Answer

A GitHub Actions workflow YAML file defines jobs with steps using the actions/setup-dotnet action to install the required SDK version, followed by standard dotnet CLI commands, with results and artifacts optionally uploaded using actions/upload-artifact for use in subsequent deployment jobs.
name: CI
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v4
        with: { dotnet-version: '8.0.x' }
      - run: dotnet restore
      - run: dotnet build --no-restore -c Release
      - run: dotnet test --no-build -c Release --logger trx
      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        with: { name: test-results, path: '**/*.trx' }
Real-world example A team's GitHub Actions workflow runs on every pull request, automatically posting test results and coverage reports as a PR comment before a reviewer even opens the code, catching issues early in the review process.

Common follow-ups: How do you cache NuGet packages between workflow runs to speed up builds?;How do you set up matrix builds testing against multiple .NET versions?

.NET CLI SDK & Project Structure (csproj);Testing in .NET (xUnit Integration & Unit Testing)
All 16 CI/CD, Publishing & Deployment questions