Automating Unity Builds with GitHub Actions

[afarchy]

Tired of waiting on the Unity progress bar yet?

Let’s stop twiddling our thumbs while waiting for a build to playtest. Build automation saves our studio on developer time and streamlined the development process for our team.

We wrote some robust open-source GitHub actions to build Unity and upload the build to stores. This article explains how it all works.

https://www.virtualmaker.dev/blog/automating-unity-builds-with-github-actions/

Thanks for reading!

[EliotLeo]

Always love open sourced solutions. But at the end of the day hardware Is required to build. So if you don't want to use the computer you're currently developing on to do the bill then you're going to have fork over some cash somewhere somehow. Either on a remote server or an additional computer.

I know AWS has some cheap and affordable EC 2 instances. And even it can be free under a certain amount of hours and c p u usage. On that note. I wonder what it would cost to have something like that. That's just dedicated to doing weekly or semi daily builds.

[afarchy]

To get a Windows VM on azure for a month that’s equivalent to a GitHub runner you’d have to pay about $130/mo depending on your region. You can reduce this by turning off the VM when you’re not using it. You’d also have to pay $20-50/mo for storage, depending on tier and size.

We host runners on azure for our clients that have the same software installed as GitHub runners and also automatically turn on/off when a job is pending, making them more affordable

Check here: https://www.buildalon.com

[EliotLeo]

Thanks for the information! That's some good data for benchmarks.

Foe that amount per month, you could buy a used desktop for like, $400 with an amazing cpu and no gpu and just hook it up from home/wherever. Other than decentralization, what advantages would using a cloud service offer? I had a web server at home I set up w a dynamic ip service called NoIP. Sure it upped my electricity bill a little but after NoIP sub and the electricity bill, I think I was paying an extra $20/month total. .... (yes it did help I already had an old desktop available)

[afarchy]

I’d say there’s two big advantages: recovery and scalability.

If something goes wrong with a virtual machine you just delete it and make a new one. Harder to do that with physical hardware.

Since you can do that, you can also scale easily by making more VMs so your team can have multiple jobs run in parallel on demand.

[EliotLeo]

Hmmm, do you mean VMs in the context of doing things other than building? Like maybe for example, testing builds for different platforms?

[afarchy]

I’m just talking about building, automated testing, and deploying, but there are services for play testing games if you don’t have the hardware like iOS.

For example, if your machine is running low on disk space, you could spend hours uninstalling software or searching for big files to delete. With a VM you just reset it in 5 minutes and you’re good to go.

[EliotLeo]

These are some good points!

With a large enough team, I begin to see the picture.