Unity Remote Build Infrastructure

These are files intended to be added to a Unity project to allow building Windows Store Apps on a remote Windows server. First a Unity build is run (targeting Windows Store - this can be changed in Assets/Editor/build.js) and then the resulting Visual Studio project is built with the x86 Release configuration (which can be changed in msbuild_headless.bat).

Prerequisites

You'll need to install ssh, Unity, and Visual Studio on the remote machine. You'll also need to open Unity to activate it.

See http://seriouscodeblog.blogspot.ca/2017/03/write-hololens-apps-on-macos-linux-1.html for more details about remote build server setup.

Installation

1. Add the files from this project to your Unity project. Note that if you have customizations to your own .gitignore file you may not want to simply clobber the one you already have with the one in this project.

   You can pull down the files in the master branch of this repository and unzip them into your project using the command

   curl https://codeload.github.com/psfblair/unity_remote_build/zip/master | tar --strip-components 1 -xvpzf -
   

2. Create an environment file based on modifying the settings in env.sh.sample (or env.bat.sample, depending on your OS) to the values appropriate to your environment.

Execution

1. You should create a git repository on the remote server to which you can push your changes to local code. Once you have creatd the remote repository with git init, you should issue the git command to allow you to push to a checked-out (non-bare) repository:

    cd [PROJECT_NAME]
    # Allow pushing to checked-out (non-bare) repository
    git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead
   

2. Load the environment variables you set up in env.sh or env.bat.

3. If you are connecting to a remote machine that doesn't have a fixed IP address, and you can download an *.rdp file for that host to your local downloads directory, use the update_remote_ip.sh script to modify your /etc/hosts file to alias the value of the REMOTE_HOST environment variable to that IP address. Note that the first time you run this script you will need to initialize your /etc/hosts file with a line for that host alias, e.g.

    0.0.0.0 holodevelop
   

4. Set up the remote of your local Git repository to point to the remote server's Git repository:

   git remote add holodevelop ssh://[USER]@[HOST]/[PATH-TO-PROJECT-WITH-FORWARD-SLASHES]
   

   Now you should be able to push to the remote repository with a command such as

   git push holodevelop master
   

5. If you are using dlls or other plugins that you do not want to commit to source control, the easiest thing to do is to mount the project directory on the remote machine. When you build the dll locally, have a post-build step copy it to the Assets/Plugins directory in the mounted folder.

   The update_remote_ip.sh script already tries to mount the remote /Users directory to the location specified by the LOCAL_MOUNT_POINT environment variable.

   You can find copy scripts suitable for post-build configurations in the GitHub repository

   https://github.com/psfblair/unity_fsharp
   

6. Once the code and any necessary dlls have been pushed you should be able to run remote_build.sh (or remote_build.bat) to run the build on the remote server.

Troubleshooting

If the Unity build hangs, it may be because Unity thinks it hasn't been activated. Access the remote server using the remote desktop and make sure you can open Unity.

If you can't push to the remote repository, it may be that there are changed files in the remote workspace. You'll need to either commit or revert them; if you commit, you'll want to pull them into your local workspace and merge before you push your changes.

If you are writing your project on OS X or Linux, you won't be able to set all the necessary Unity player settings and build settings on your local workstation, since on those platforms the Windows Store application build options are not available. After pushing your code you'll need to open it once in Unity on the remote server to set the appropriate settings. Save the project and commit the changes, then pull them to your local repository.