Albacore is a suite of tools for the professional .Net or mono developer that make their life easier.

gem install albacore

• Runs .Net and mono builds on OS X, Windows and Linux quick and painless
• Manage xbuild/msbuild transparently
• NuGet restore without intrusive .nuget target files in your project files, authentication supported
• NuGet pack task types for packaging your code, supports packaging symbols/source and custom nuspecs, getting metadata from context
• Declarative Rake syntax makes it easy to read Rakefiles
• Most tasks, including the NuGet tasks accept an array of csproj- or fsproj- files and act on all those projects, discovering metadata from their XML.
• An improved set APIs for calling operating system processes and managing them from the build script (see DSL below)
• Quick and easy to turn on debugging, just set the DEBUG env var
• Assembly version generation in C#, F#, C++ and VB
• A copy-local test-runner for those of you with Parallels/Fusion needing to shadow-copy assemblies from a 'network drive'
• An innovative .appspec file lets you construct IIS Site-packages with Chocolatey on Windows, Topshelf services with Chocolatey on Windows and RPM and DEB services on Linux with three lines of code - become the DevOps GOD of your company!
• Transparent publish of artifacts to TeamCity with the TC extension
• Unit tested, high quality Ruby code
• Actively developed by @haf

The wiki is the main reference for the above task types, but there's also very extensive documentation in the code, as well as hundreds of unit tests written in a easy-to-read rspec syntax.

gem install albacore
albacore init

Now you have the initial setup and can run bundle exec rake. (nokogiri error?) But please read below:

Follow along for a quick intro, but if on Windows, see the section 'Installing Ruby' first. Albacore works on both Ruby 1.9.3 and 2.x.

First create Gemfile with these contents:

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'albacore', '~> 2.0.0'

When setting up your build you need to ensure it is reproducible. Bundler allows you to lock down the few gems that Albacore depend on to their specific versions, ensuring that your peers can re-run the same build script you just built and that it works well on your continous integration server.

Now you can bundle the dependencies, effectively freezing all gem dependencies that your build depends on.

bundle
git add Gemfile*
git commit -m 'Installed Albacore'

Now you are ready to continue reading below for your first Rakefile.

First install Ruby 32 bits from http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/ - e.g. v2.1.5 32-bits which is the latest version, at time of writing.

Second, install Ruby DevKit, or you won't be able to install nokogiri. Download it lower down on the same page, open a console:

cd \DevKit
ruby dk.rb init
ruby dk.rb install

Now close that console and open a new console, and run:

gem install bundler

This gives you a working ruby installation. Continue below with your first Rakefile.

You can also try chocolatey ruby and ruby2.devkit packages.

brew install rbenv ruby-build
rbenv install 2.2.0
gem install bundler

Done. Ensure brew doctor is clean enough and that ruby --version outputs the expected version.

In order to build your project, you need to create a Rakefile, with contents like these:

require 'bundler/setup'

require 'albacore'
require 'albacore/tasks/versionizer'
require 'albacore/ext/teamcity'

Albacore::Tasks::Versionizer.new :versioning

desc 'Perform fast build (warn: doesn\'t d/l deps)'
build :quick_build do |b|
  b.logging = 'detailed'
  b.sln     = 'src/MyProj.sln'
end

desc 'restore all nugets as per the packages.config files'
nugets_restore :restore do |p|
  p.out = 'src/packages'
  p.exe = 'tools/NuGet.exe'
end

desc 'Perform full build'
build :build => [:versioning, :restore] do |b|
  b.sln = 'src/MyProj.sln'
  # alt: b.file = 'src/MyProj.sln'
end

directory 'build/pkg'

desc 'package nugets - finds all projects and package them'
nugets_pack :create_nugets => ['build/pkg', :versioning, :build] do |p|
  p.files   = FileList['src/**/*.{csproj,fsproj,nuspec}'].
    exclude(/Tests/)
  p.out     = 'build/pkg'
  p.exe     = 'tools/NuGet.exe'
  p.with_metadata do |m|
    m.description = 'A cool nuget'
    m.authors = 'Henrik'
    m.version = ENV['NUGET_VERSION']
  end
  p.with_package do |p|
    p.add_file 'file/relative/to/proj', 'lib/net40'
  end
end

task :default => :create_nugets

You can now run:

bundle exec rake

You can continue reading about the available task-types in the wiki.

If you're upgrading from v1.0, there's an article there for you

1. Create a feature branch with your change: a. With unit test b. With feature
2. Send a PR with that feature branch to this branch a. Make sure TravisCI is OK with it b. Describe your PR in English.

1. Add a rspec spec in specs/
2. Run bundle exec rspec spec to verify test fails
3. Implement feature you want
4. Run the tests again, have them pass
5. Make a PR from your feature branch against master

Document your code with YARD as you're writing it: it's much easier to write the documentation together with the code than afterwards.

If you get a problem installing nokogiri, you have two choices: yum install epel-release && yum install ruby rubygems-nokogiri && gem install albacore which loads nokogiri from epel, or you could do: yum install ruby gcc ruby-devel zlib-devel libxslt-devel libxml2-devel && gem install nokogiri which lets rubygems compile nokogiri.