Cake

This extension contains a custom build task that runs Cake build scripts for you.

Cake (C# Make) is a cross platform build automation system with a C# DSL to do things like compiling code, copy files/folders, running unit tests, compress files and build NuGet packages.

Run Cake scripts easily

The Cake VSO build tasks makes it easy to run a Cake script directly without having to invoke PowerShell or other commands line scripts. This makes it easy even for team members not familiar with Cake to add or adjust parameters passed to your build scripts.

How to use the build task

After installing this extension, a new task will become available called "Cake Task" when you add a new build step for a build definition.

By default, the Cake build step (when added to a build) will try to run the build.cake build script (found in the root of your repository) with the target Default. If you wish to run another build script or build target you can change this in the build step settings.

At the moment, only Windows build agents are supported, but we expect to add support for other build agents soon.

Advanced Settings

There are several advanced settings that control where the Cake build step downloads tools from.

Use the Build Agent Nuget

This will use the version of nuget.exe shipped with the build agent <AgentInstallFolder>\agent\Worker\Tools\Nuget.exe if set. This is set to False by default.

Nuget Exe Location

If not using the Build Agent copy of nuget.exe this setting specifies where to download the executable from. This can be a URL e.g. https://nuget.org/nuget.exe or a simple folder path such as D:\Tools\Nuget.exe. If nothing is set the task will download nuget.exe from https://dist.nuget.org/win-x86-commandline/latest/nuget.exe

Tool Feed URL

The cake.exe, #addin and #tool packages are by default downloaded from the default nuget.org package feed. You can download these tools from an alternate feed by specifiying it here.

Learn more

For more information about Cake, please see the Cake website or the Cake source code repository.