Azure DevOps issue with GIT, Visual Studio and Azure (Umbraco)

Question

I am completely new to Visual Studio, .net and Azure DevOps

I have a problem with GIT using the GIT bits (rather than CMD), in Visual Studio

I have a .Net application (Umbraco), that has been built and runs fine. I built a CI pipeline in the Azure Deployment blade for my Azure web App. All works fine.

When I go to Azure DevOps I can see this pipeline and it is called myappname -CI

If I add a test file locally to my Repo, file >new file > test.txt and save it, it appears as a change in the GIT explorer on the right-hand side. I can then click the "push" blue arrow and off it goes, no errors and appears in my DevOps repo. great! but the problem seems to be that the whole lot syncs, I mean the whole application which then starts off the installation set up of Umbraco. Its odd, its almost as if one small change to the code, fires the DevOps pipeline and pushes the whole application to Azure.

Is this something to do with the CI (continuous Integration), bit of DevOps pipelines?

I am totally sure that all I am sending from VS is one file to my Azure DevOps repo. It then fires and overwrites the whole application. Which of course I do not want to happen, just want to make small dev changes to files, add files and send them to DevOps

Just too add to the confusion, if I FTP in to the application I seem to have a whole different set of files, which suggests its is being built as well

Newbie alert

Answer 1

You need a little more understanding of Git and Continuous Integration (CI) systems. The main goal of a CI system is to automate the building of your project or code when it receives notification that a change has occurred in your git repository. But there are nuances that can be added so a specific change to the code repository so it doesn't start the CI process.

First, understand the .gitignore file. It is used to prevent specific files to be checked into your git repository.

Second, the build pipeline can be triggered for all or specific branches. So if you check in code into the develop branch and you only want the CI process to start when there are changes to the master branch, then you can configure the build pipeline to monitor the master branch only.

Third, you can filter the DIRECTORY within the git repository to monitor. So let's say that you have two folders: /docs and /src. You can have the CI build pipeline only monitor the /src directory and ignore everything else. So check-ins to the /docs will not set off the build pipeline.

Lastly, with Azure DevOps you can ignore the complete commit check-in IF you use ***NO_CI*** at the end of your commit message. So even if you have none of the other filters in place mentioned above, you can prevent the CI build pipeline from starting if you include the ***NO_CI*** string in your commit message.