CI/CD with Godot 4 + C# + itch

This is a small repo demonstrating a possible CI/CD¹ setup using a Godot 4 C# example project.

The workflows do the following work:

• whenever a new commit is pushed, a dev release of all the platforms is pushed on a game with a restricted access on itch.
• whenever a tag with a semantic version² is pushed, a release with the same version number is pushed on a public project.

I found this approach practical in order to have a kind of "nightly" build that can be accessed only by testers / internal devs, and a public build containing the released versions.

Limitations

This project has been tested only on Godot 4.1.1, with a C# project, and producing a Linux and Windows build. Other configurations could easily not work!

The Godot workflow used doesn't support parallel compilation right now, but there's a pull request on the way for that.

How do I use it?

Copy the .github/workflows directory contents to your project, and then go to your GitHub project and fill these values in Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions.

• Secret BUTLER_CREDENTIALS, as instructed by manleydev/butler-publish-itchio-action
• Variable ITCH_USER, your itch user
• Variable PRIVATE_PROJECT_NAME, the name of the restricted game on itch
• Variable PUBLIC_PROJECT_NAME, the name of the public game on itch

After this, it's very likely you will need to personalize it further. Read below to understand how it works, so you know where to operate.

How does it work?

Mostly thanks to the work of other people!

• firebelley/godot-export does most of the job, creating the exports of the projects,
• manleydev/butler-publish-itchio-action publishes the releases to itch,
• and damienaicheh/extract-version-from-tag-action extracts the tag from the git repository.

The main workflow is export_game.yml. The first job (export_game) checks out the project, builds the dotnet part, exports it for windows and linux, and uploads the produced exports as artifacts. This way two consecutive jobs (upload_to_itch_windows and upload_to_itch_linux) can pick up the artifacts and upload them to itch.

This main workflow is called by dev.yml and release.yml. The first one is activated on every push, and just calls the main workflow pointing to the restricted game. release.yml, instead, is triggered only when a tag containing a semver² pattern starting with "v" is pushed, and first checks out the project to compute the current version, then calls export_game.yml passing the version and the public game.

An example

Well, this repo is the example.

You can find the public game here, and the restricted game here (with password "buildsystem").

Footnotes

1. (actually, only the "CD" part) ↩

2. only versions in the form vMajor.Minor.Patch are supported right now, nothing fancier ↩ ↩²