Can anybody tell me where the Release Artifact comes from when you use it in a Release Definition?
I’m currently using TFS on-prem (v15 Update 1) to handle undertake Build & Release. I believe this version is very close to what the current Azure DevOps documentation describes as ‘Classic’.
I have a Build Definition that outputs an Artifact to the default local path on the agent (c:\agent_work\1\a) using the Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory. I also publish/copy the artifact to a network share.
I have a Release Definition which references the Build Definition as a Linked Artifact Source. Therefore, when I create a new release where does the Release Definition get the Artifact Does it get it from my published network share? Does it get it from Source Control? How do I know it’s getting it from TFS or Network Share?
I know the Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory gets deleted on every build, so I know it can’t be from that location.
You tied your release definition to a build definition. Build definitions can publish artifacts when they run.
Your release definition looks at a build run, looks at the artifacts it published, and then retrieves them from whatever location to which they were published. This can be a file share, or it can be within the TFS/Azure DevOps instance itself. Not source control or Azure Artifacts, but rather a completely internal store just for builds.
Now to directly answer your question:
How do you know where the artifact came from? By looking at the build run. How do you know where the artifacts are going to be published in the future? By looking at the build definition.
Related
In Azure DevOps, can I build a solution using the Visual studio Build task, publish the .exe file to the artifacts (or somewhere else, repo?) and then utilize that .exe file in another pipeline?
If so, to where and how should I publish it and then how do I reference it?
thanks
D.J. recommended possible solution, though I am using different approach with Universal Packages:
Once the binary is produced, the pipeline publishes it as Universal
Package to Artifact Feet
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/artifacts/universal-packages?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml#publish-a-universal-package
Any other pipeline in project or organization can reference the Artifact Feed and utilize
the binary as part of the job
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/artifacts/universal-packages?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml#download-a-universal-package
This solution requires more effort, since you have to create the Artifact Feed, but it is possible to use the published artifacts across projects within the organization. This is ideal when project produces libraries for integration. Other projects can reference the feed and use up-to-date libraries as part of their build.
Artifact feeds support Semantic Versioning. You can find more about Artifact Feeds in Azure DevOps here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/artifacts/concepts/feeds?view=azure-devops
It only depends on what are your specific requirements.
Yes this is possible. You can use pipeline-artifacts for a start. The artifacts will be associated with the pipline, you'll have a task for publishing at the end of the pipeline that creates the exe-file and downloading at the start of the other pipeline that re-uses that exe.
See this for reference -> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/artifacts/pipeline-artifacts?view=azure-devops&tabs=classic
Simply speaking, does Azure Devops have something that works very close to GitHub releases?
I would like to publish artifacts that are created during an Azure DevOps pipeline so that they be easily viewed and downloaded afterwards in a central location. The closest equivalent to what I'm looking for is how GitHub releases work, where there is a web page listing out all the versions of the repository and the assets that can be downloaded for each version.
It seems to me that published artifacts within Azure DevOps pipelines are always tied to the run of the pipeline, and there isn't an easy way to see one list of artifacts that have been created in a historical view like GitHub releases provides, but maybe I'm missing something.
Azure Artifacts does not meet my needs because it is tied to particular packaging formats and is meant to be used for developer tooling.
I would like to publish artifacts that are created during an Azure
DevOps pipeline so that they be easily viewed and downloaded
afterwards in a central location.
As a workaround ,you can switch Artifact publish location to A file share in Publish Pipeline Artifacts task then specify your network drive folder path.
Specifying the path to the file share where you want to copy the files. The path must be a fully-qualified path or a valid path relative to the root directory of your repository. Publishing artifacts from a Linux or macOS agent to a file share is not supported.
Besides, there should be no other built-in hosting, I am afraid that Azure Artifact is the closest to your needs. because it is tied to particular packaging formats you can consider using Universal Packages.
I'm new to Aure DevOps. Trying to create build and release pipelines there's one thing I don't understand:
Commonly, every kind of build finally results in some output, called artifacts.
With Azure DevOps it seems like there is always a final copy or publish task necessary to copy the created artifact from A to B, so the release task may then access the compiled artifacts.
Why aren't these artifacts plain accessible to a release pipeline right from the location where they have been built? Why don't the build tasks automatically set a variable pointing to the right folder, so the release pipeline may access the files right from there?
Or is this already happening and I'm just missing something from the tutorials I watched?
There are so many reasons.
Two easy ones:
There is no guarantee that the agent's working folder still contains the files. Agents are reused from build to build and release to release, and a given build or release will always use the same working folder. The working folder is cleaned up between builds.
Releases may run on different agents. On different machines. In different domains. Or any combination. There's no guarantee that the agent where the build ran is accessible by the agent where the release is running. Publishing the artifact allows a guarantee: As long as the machine the release is running on has the ability to talk to Azure DevOps (which is a requirement for the agent to function in the first place), it can get the artifacts it needs.
Why aren't these artifacts plain accessible to a release pipeline
right from the location where they have been built?
Agree with Daniel.
The main reason for me is because we can't hold the hosted agent all the time. Since MS wants to protect resources efficiently, it is not occupied for a long time.
When we queue a build, MS will assign us a brand new clean agent to execute our task, and after the build is complete, the MS will reclaim the agent assigned to our build and restore the agent to its initial state in preparation for accepting the assignment of the next task.
So, we could not keep hold the hosted agent to use it in next release pipeline. We have to store the artifacts in the cloud/server, then we could download it in the release pipeline. Otherwise, we could not get the artifact we need from an agent that has been restored.
Besides, MS is randomly assigned to the agent, and we cannot guarantee that the same agent will be allocated and built during the release pipeline.
That is the main reason why we need to copy or publish the artifacts.
If you do not want to copy or publish the artifacts, you could setup your own private agent, and do not clean the agent before you execute the release pipeline.
Update:
why is the user, well, bothered to find a place for the artifacts
manually? I would have expected every build pipeline to come with a
personal space to store the latest build artifacts. A space where
Azure DevOps automatically copies the build artifacts to. To me it
looks like things have to be manually copied from A to B and then
later from B to C.
That because not all output is needed, for example, the test project, what we need is test result/Code coverage for the test project, not the output for the solution. In this case, we do not need to copy the output to the artifacts. On the other hand, we need to copy some special files to artfacts, then automatically copy the build artifacts will not meet your requirements.
That is also the reason why we provide the task to copy files to artifacts, so that we could customize our personality needs.
Of course, if you think that manual copying is superfluous, you can use the MSBuild parameter /p:output=$(build.artifactstagingdirectory) to set the output directly to artifacts.
If I need to copy things from A to B in the Build pipeline, then what
should keep me from copying it to C right away? Then a separate
Release pipeline would be, well, rather optional, if not redundant.
If you are in the build pipeline, there is another task Download build artifacts, which could download the build artifacts.
if you are in the release pipeline, you just need select the build artifacts as source, release pipeline will download that artifact automatically:
Check this document for some more details.
Hope this helps.
I currently have a release defined for pushing clients to an internal nuget server.
Each release is identical in terms of steps, the only thing that changes is the triggering artifact.
However when I add another artifact to a "generic" release, so that there are now ClientA and ClientB artifacts on the release, both artifacts are downloaded when the release is triggered and they are both then pushed.
What I would like to know is if it is possible to have the release only download the triggering artifact.
Example:
A release is triggered on both ClientA and ClientB.
ClientB is released. The build triggers and only uses the ClientB artifact during the deployment.
I don't think this is possible at the moment, but something similar is possible though.
Create a task group from the current release definition as described here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/pipelines/library/task-groups?view=vsts
There clone the release definition and change the artifact from ClientA to ClientB.
You'll end up having two release definition, both sharing the steps but the artifacts will be different.
EDIT: PowerShell script to download Build artifacts
Eddie suggested a nice workaround. Here's how you can pull down an artifact manually.
You need to enable Allow scripts to access OAuth token
Add a PowerShell task to each phase and reference the DownloadBuildArtifacts.ps1 script
If the release is triggered by build artifacts, the value of the pre-defined variable "$(RELEASE.TRIGGERINGARTIFACT.ALIAS)" will be the triggered artifacts alias. You can get the value of this variable to determine which artifact trigger the release.
There isn't any way to achieve this out of box. But you can disable auto download artifacts and add a powershell script in your release definition to get the triggered artifact and download it.
There isn't the way to just download the triggered artifacts, but you can identify which artifact trigger this release through RELEASE_TRIGGERINGARTIFACT_ALIAS variable.
So, you can push corresponding one per to that variable.
I have successfully created a Build definition in VSTS for some SharePoint client side projects that I'm working on. I tried creating a Release definition but I can't seem to find any way for me to copy/download the artifacts created from my build definition locally. I may be missing something since I'm still quite new with VSTS but I can't seem to figure it out.
To downbload build artifacts from release when build successful, you can specify the release definition as below:
Add the build artifacts with latest version in release definition.
Enable Continuous deployment trigger for the artifacts.
Select the private agent which you want to download on the local machine.
Now when a build succeed, a new release will be triggered to download the latest build artifacts.