I have a Xamarin forms application that builds locally on my Windows dev machine, using msbuild on the command line. This works because I installed the Xamarin workload in Visual Studio.
However, I want to set up a CI pipeline on a third-party CI provider. This means that I need to set up all the build requirements on the build agent myself. Ideally I can just provide a docker image to run the build on.
What are the required programs that I need to install to use msbuild to build Xamarin.Forms for Android? Do I need the .NET framework SDK, Mono, the Java SDK, something else or all of the above?
Which docker image should I use as a base, and how can I install said required programs automatically? Does it absolutely need to be a Windows-based image?
Alternatively, is this possible at all? Or do I need to install the build runner on a Windows VPS and install Visual Studio + Xamarin manually? Note that I'm only interested in targeting Android for now.
Edit: We decided to go with another CI provider for this project, which provides windows VMs with Visual Studio and Xamarin installed.