Azure Automation Runbooks moving to GitHub
TechNet Script Center gallery hosting Automation scripts (runbooks) as shown in the Runbooks Gallery is set to retire by December 2020. You can go through the official announcement here by the TechNet team. It entails that all PowerShell & Python scripts available at Script Center gallery would have to be moved to another location. We’ve chosen GitHub as the new source for all Azure the TechNet gallery here. We chose GitHub due to the various benefits offered by the platform around making it easy to contribute to your open-source projects, showcase your work to the community, track down issues, documentation etc.
The change would go live by Jan 15, 2021.
How will it look like?
Today, there are more than 700 Azure Scripts owned by various Product Teams at Microsoft as well as external contributors. These scripts are accessed by the customers through the Runbook Gallery blade of the Automation account in the Azure Portal. The Source filter, previously shown as Script Center would be replaced by GitHub as shown below. The workflow will be integrated with GitHub moving forward.
Upon selecting a runbook, “View Source Project” will take you to the GitHub repository for that script. Runbooks displayed from Source PowerShell Gallery will remain as-is without any changes.
What will change?
Summarizing the changes that you will see in the script migration from Script Center to GitHub below:
- The Top-level GitHub organization would be azureautomation
- Each Script Center script would be a repository created with the same name as the script under “azureautomation” organization.
- All the scripts will have a GitHub Topic as "azureautomationrunbookgallery".
- Script center license would be moved to the GitHub License.md file.
- All the script metadata fields in script center such as Author, rating, downloads, summary, category, sub-category, tags etc. would be added to the GitHub Metadata.json file.
- Readme.md file holds the script description & a note for scripts have been migrated from Script Center.
” TechNet gallery is retiring! This script was migrated from TechNet script center to GitHub by Microsoft Azure Automation product group. All the Script Center fields like Rating, Rating Count and Download Count have been carried over to GitHub as-is for the migrated scripts only. Note: The Script Center fields will not be applicable for the new repositories created in GitHub & hence those fields will not show up for new GitHub repositories.”
- Script center Q&A will not be moved to GitHub. You can instead use GitHub tracker called Issues which is a great way to keep track of tasks, enhancements, and bugs for your projects.
- New Scripts (Runbooks) synced from GitHub to the Runbook Gallery won’t have Rating & downloads field as these fields are specific to Script Center and not GitHub. You’d only see Created By & Last updated field for GitHub scripts.
What to do next?
If you want to contribute to an existing runbook:
You can either raise a PR with the changes or create a fork out of the repository.
Note: If you fork the repository, the runbook maybe be shown twice on the Automation runbook gallery (One of them would be the original and other one would be the forked one.)2.
If you want to author a new runbook for runbook gallery:
- Create a public repository on GitHub and add the runbook, readme.md, description etc.
- Add the topic “azureautomationrunbookgallery” to make sure it is discovered by our service and displayed in the Automation Runbook gallery.
- If the runbook that you created is a PowerShell workflow or a python 3 runbook add the topic “PowerShellWorkflow” or “Python3” respectively. No specific Topic is needed for PowerShell runbooks. These Topics would be used for categorization & search operation in the Runbook Gallery.
- Sync duration between GitHub & Automation Runbook Gallery would be 12 hours for updated and new added runbooks.
- We strongly encourage you to contribute & help grow the Azure Automation community. Share the amazing work you’ve been doing with the runbooks with the community members. Your contributions would be appreciated!
- Please don’t forget to “star” rate the repository if you use or like it or it helped you with your scenario. This will help us improve our categorization workflow within Runbook Gallery and show you the most popular scripts first.
Happy Automation!
Learn more about Azure Automation.