You know how handy that 'Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt' is on your local machine? And how it adds several things to PATH to allow you to just issue commands like msbuild or otherwise? Use this action to setup similar flexibility in your Windows-based GitHub Actions runners. This will let you discover where the MSBuild tool is and automatically add it to the PATH environment variables for you so future steps in your Actions workflow can just initiate msbuild commands without knowing the full path.

Please note this tools is not to replicate the full 'Developer Command Prompt' but only discover and assist with MSBuild and not other tools like cl.exe

- name: Add msbuild to PATH
  uses: microsoft/[email protected]

You may have a situation where your Actions runner has multiple versions of Visual Studio and you need to find a specific version of the tool. Simply add the vs-version input to specify the range of versions to find. If looking for a specific version, specify the minimum and maximum versions as shown in the example below, which will look for just 16.4.

- name: Add msbuild to PATH
  uses: microsoft/[email protected]
  with:
    vs-version: '[16.4,16.5)'

The syntax is the same used for Visual Studio extensions, where square brackets like "[" mean inclusive, and parenthesis like "(" mean exclusive. A comma is always required, but eliding the minimum version looks for all older versions and eliding the maximum version looks for all newer versions. See the vswhere wiki for more details.

This makes use of the vswhere tool which is a tool delivered by Microsoft to help in identifying Visual Studio installs and various components. This tool is installed on the hosted Windows runners for GitHub Actions. If you are using a self-hosted runner, you either need to make sure vswhere.exe is in your agent's PATH or specify a full path to the location using:

- name: Add msbuild to PATH
  uses: microsoft/[email protected]
  with:
    vswhere-path: 'C:\path\to\your\tools\'

While the Action enables you to specify a vswhere path as well as a vs-version, these are more advanced options and when using GitHub-hosted runners you should not need these and is recommended you don't specify them. Using these require you to fully understand the runner environment, updates to the tools on the runner, and can cause failures if you are out of sync. For GitHub-hosted runners, omitting these arguments is the preferred usage.

As with most GitHub Actions, this requires NodeJS development tools. After installing NodeJS, you can build this by executing:

npm install
npm run build
npm run pack

which will modify/create the /dist folder with the final index.js output

Thank you to Warren Buckley for being a core contributor to this Action for the benefit of all developers!

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.