General workflow for publishing an Android app to the Google Play store when developing with VSTS

1. Create a Git repository (not TFVC) in VSTS, possibly with a new Team Project, up to you.
2. Create your app in Android Studio and add it to the Git repository.
3. Create your Key Store (or import an existing one) with Android Studio.
• In order to be able to sign your APK and deploy it (with any tool, but in this case VSTS), you'll need the following 3 pieces of information:
• The Key Store password
• The Key alias
• The Key password
4. Ensure that you've imported the "Manifest Versioning Build Tasks" extension to your VSTS account from the VSTS Marketplace.
5. Configure and execute an automated build for your application using the default steps provided by VSTS when creating a new build by applying the Android build template.
1. Add to the default build templae a "Manifest Versioning Build Tasks" step to automatically generate your application version from the build.
6. In your Google account, do the following:
1. Ensure that you've gone to the Google Play Console page and created a Developer Page.
• Once you've created the Service Account below, you'll need to come back here to the Play Console and grant access with "RELEASE MANAGEMENT" permissions, ensuring that you also have the "Release manager" role selected.
• ENSURE THAT YOU'VE COMPLETED ALL THE WARNINGS IN THE NAVIGATION PANE IN THE GOOGLE PLAY CONSOLE, OTHERWISE YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO ROLL-OUT ANY OF YOUR RELEASES.
2. Ensure that you've gone to the Google API Console and created a Service Account for publishing your app to the Google Play store.
• NOTE: You'll need to export your key in JSON format so that the email and key fields within the JSON object can be used to configure your Google Play endpoint in VSTS
7. Ensure that you've imported the Microsoft "Google Play" extension into your VSTS account from the Marketplace.
8. Configure your automated Release in VSTS. Execute the following steps:
1. Add an "Android Signing" step to your release to sign one of the *unsigned* APKs from your build.
2. Add a "Google Play - Release" step to your release. You'll need the keystore information mentioned above, as well as the keystore *.jks file to upload to VSTS in the "Google Play - Release" step.
9. Now that your release is configured, you'll have to to a manual build on your developer (just once) to product a signed APK with the keystore, and then manually upload the signed APK file to the Google Play Console to an Alpha release in order to associate your applicationId (in the ApplicationManifest.xml app manifest file) to your product in the Play Store.

Bootstrapping a VSTS Linux build agent for Docker containers

1. Create an Ubuntu 17.04 VM in Azure
2. Install dotnetcore using the instructions here.
3. Install the Docker apt-get package using the instructions here.
4. Download and run the VSTS agent Docker image and run it as a Docker container itself using the instructions here, e.g. sudo docker run -e VSTS_ACCOUNT=myvstsaccountname -e VSTS_TOKEN=abcdtokenherefromportal -e VSTS_POOL="Docker Build Agents" -e VSTS_AGENT="myagentname" -it -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock microsoft/vsts-agent

Using Git with a corporate firewall that uses certificate interception

Like many open source tools (originally or completely) based on Linux, git has issues with self-signed certificates, especially if you work in a corporate environment where your company may have network message inspection hardware for security. To get git to work in such an environment, you'll need the public root Certificate Authority certificate for your company, exported to a base 64 .cer file. Once you have that, run the following command to install it into git's private certificate store:

git config --global http.sslCAInfo "<path/to/your/certfile.cer or .pem>"

Using NodeJS with a corporate firewall that uses certificate interception

See this post on Stack Overflow. The gist of it:

1. Export your company's corporate Root CA certificate to a Base64 encoded .cer file
2. Run this command to instruct npm to use the certificate file in its communications:

npm config set cafile = "<path to your certificate file>"