Building MAUI Application with GitHub Actions

In this repo we have the sample application for the .NET MAUI for Windows desktop and we test and build it, and release it under the Releases in the GitHub.

The content of this repo came from the following sources:

Gerald Versluis

Publish a .NET MAUI app for Windows

Create a certificate for package signing

Creating Self Signed Certificate

For the application to be able to be installed we need to create a Signed Certificate, if we were deplying it to the Microsoft Store they would create a certificate, but this is not this case.

Follow the steps from:

Create a certificate for package signing

Consider the following

• Create a certificate

Notice that "Contoso Software, O=Contoso Corporation, C=US" needs to match with the same value inside the Package.appxmanifest on Platforms > Windows of your .NET MAUI project.

Save the Thumprint value created.

• Export PFX certificate

User the Password usage approach

GitHub Secrets

Since we don't want to push out certificate with the solution, this would be a real bad practice...

We need to use the GitHub Actions Secrets, access them from your Repo Settings.

We cannot upload files for the Secrets, but we can convert our PFX cert to file.

From PowerShell do the following:

certutil.exe -encode <CERT PATH> <OUTPUT PATH FILE>

You can open the output file and create a Secret variable with the content.

You also need of Secret with the certificate thumbprint and the certificate password.

Explaining build-windows.yml

We have a few enviroment variables to facilite our life:

env:
  ARTIFACT_NAME: MAUI.Installer
  PROJECT_PATH: src\MauiWithGitActions\MauiWithGitActions.csproj
  PFX_ASC_FILE: cert.pfx.asc
  PFX_FILE: cert.pfx

The most intersting part of the Build job is the following:

We create a certificate from the Secret ASCII data.

- name: Decrypt PFX Certificate file
        run: | 
            echo "${{secrets.WINDOWS_PFX_FILE}}" > ${{env.PFX_ASC_FILE}}
            certutil -decode ${{env.PFX_ASC_FILE}} ${{env.PFX_FILE}}

We add the Certificate to the windows running machine:

  - name: Add Cert to Windows Host
        run: certutil -user -q -p ${{secrets.WINDOWS_PFX_PASSWORD}} -importpfx ${{env.PFX_FILE}} NoRoot

Build our apllication MSIX install file:

- name: Publish app for release
        run: dotnet publish ${{env.PROJECT_PATH}} -c Release -f:net6.0-windows10.0.19041.0 /p:GenerateAppxPackageOnBuild=true /p:AppxPackageSigningEnabled=true /p:PackageCertificateThumbprint="${{secrets.WINDOWS_PFX_PRINT}}"

And upload the MSIX file to our repo Release page

      - name: Create Release
        uses: ncipollo/release-action@v1
        with:
          artifacts: .\**\AppPackages\**\MauiWithGitActions*.msix
          allowUpdates: true
          tag: ${{ github.ref }}
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

The user can download the MauiWithGitActions file to install, however there a few things they neeed to do to be able to install it.

Reference to the PUBLISH part of the article: Publish a .NET MAUI app for Windows