Can i run a single job to trigger multiple release pipelines in Azure Devops. We have multiple microservices which are being built and deployed separately that are independent of each other but the business ask now is to treat them as a release and deploy so wondering how that can be achieved off a release tag(1.x.x)which gets tagged for every release run.
We do the same thing for the app I work on. We wrote a PowerShell script to kick off the releases utilizing the DevOps Rest API. The documentation is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/devops/release/definitions?view=azure-devops-rest-6.0.
You basically pass in a list of Release DefinitionIds and then set the status of the latest Release to "inProgress" to start it.
If you want to target a specific release, you can use the searchText query parameter to find a release by the name. We created a variable group with the names of the releases in it and use that to target them.
Related
The current scenario is I want a Release Pipeline that has multiple artifacts (one function and several apis). Each one with a cd trigger except for the one to prod which is manual for right now.
In the pipeline is there a way to prevent a particular job from running if deployed pipeline is the same as the original?
For example, a change is made to one of the apis but the rest remain the same I would want the release to get created and deployed but only run the deployment job linked to that particular artifact.
The reason being is that for a deployment to production it would be nice to have all the artifacts I'm looking to deploy in one place and all I would have to do to deploy to prod would be hitting deploy and if the latest artifact is newer then the one deployed it gets deployed but if it is not that deployment would be skipped.
Right now each artifact is in a separate release pipeline and each gets deployed separately, which means we are keeping a separate document with a list of all the release pipelines that needing to be deployed for a specific set of changes.
Any direction would be appreciated, thanks in advance.
I think you can do that with multi-stages and triggers. You can follow these steps:
Create a release pipeline.
Add all your artifacts.
Create multiple stages. According to your requirement, you may need as many stages as your artifacts.
Set triggers for each stage. Click on the lightning icon to the left of the stage. In "Triggers", select "Afer release". Then enable the "Artifact filters". Choose the artifacts that correspond to this stage as the trigger. Here is an example:
Then your release pipeline will be look like this:
When an artifact changes, the corresponding stages will be triggered, and no other stages will run.
It doesn't work. If an artifact is changed it doesnt checked that the artifact is newer
I have two pipelines on azure devops that do the following:
BUILD PIPELINE
Asks the user for the desire branch name and ticket id (from our ticketing system). Using two "settable at queue time" variables.
Gets the files from the specified branch name, builds the project and generate the artifacts that are later use by the RELEASE pipeline
RELEASE PIPELINE
This release pipeline is being triggered by the completion of the BUILD pipeline specified before. This pipeline completes the following tasks:
Creates new app service slot using an Azure CLI command task. In this task I need the ticket id, in order to create the slot with the corresponding ticket id as its name
Deploy the application to the created app service slot
I haven't found a way to pass to the RELEASE pipeline the ticket id the user entered when running the BUILD pipeline that triggered this RELEASE.
Unfortunately, there's no such a build-in function in Azure DevOps. While thanks to Martin Hinshelwood, we had an extension- Variable Tools for Azure DevOps Services to achieve the goal.
As you can see in the extension's doc, add a Variable Save Task in your build pipeline and a Variable Load Task in your release pipeline. After these two tasks, the variables are fully passed to your release.
Check below as reference:
I need to deploy many similar apps to the same environments with Azure DevOps.
What are some ways to share and maintain the release process for these apps....
to avoid updating every app's Release process when it changes?
Background
I have dozens of similar apps with identical release processes.
Each app (in its own repo) will have its own Azure Pipeline.
I'm fine with a custom solution to this problem.
Options
Make a Release for every Pipeline -- not a fan!
CON: Azure seems to want a 1-to-1 relationship between Pipelines and Releases.
CON: I want to avoid many Releases at all costs, since changes would be nearly unmaintainable.
Use custom stage templates -- doesn't work for what I need
CON: Releases do not share custom stage templates.
Custom templates that you create are scoped to the project that you created them in. [Azure Documentation]
CON: Custom stage templates cannot be updated (as of this post).
To update an stage template, delete the existing template in a release pipeline and then save the stage as a template with the same name. [Azure Documentation]
Put the release process in the Pipeline .yml file -- seems possible, but....
PRO: The process would be stored in a shared "common" repo.
PRO: Each app will have a minimal Pipeline .yml file, setting some parameters before running the shared process.
CON: How would I track and manually deploy releases without the Release portal UI? Am I missing something?
Trigger the same Release with artifacts from different apps -- not sure this will work....
PRO: One release process, easy to track and deploy as needed via the Release portal UI.
CON: How would I track releases for different apps? Would I name Releases with the app name?
CON: I don't see how to set it up, since a Release is tied to a primary Pipeline.
At the time of linking an artifact source to a release pipeline.... [Azure Documentation]
CON: Though multiple artifact sources can be used, Releases need a default artifact Pipeline or source repo. Would I need to setup the artifact source programmatically?
When you link multiple artifact sources to a release pipeline, one of them is designated as the primary artifact source. The primary artifact source is used to set a number of pre-defined variables. It can also be used in naming releases. [Azure Documentation]
Use multiple artifact sources and artifact variables -- not sure this will work....
When there are multiple artifact sources linked to a release pipeline, you can access information about each of these. [Azure Documentation]
Bottom Line
I was able to solve many of these problems in Octopus Deploy. However, I'm having significant trouble seeing how to move my DevOps process into Azure DevOps. How would you handle this situation?
There is no perfect solution to meet your requirements.
Generally deploy multiple apps to multiple environments, we recommend that Make a Release for every Pipeline. But just as you mentioned it has 1-to-1 relationship between build pipelines and Releases and it has many releases.
We can deploy multiple apps to multiple environments through ONE release with customized Template as you mentioned, we can also use the Task Groups to combine a set of tasks together, then reuse them in different stages. But we still need to update the definitions accordingly (change the Task Group version) once the specific task group is updated.
Another way is Clone Stage, you mentioned they are the same environments, so you can config one stage, then clone stages from the existing one, just name the stages with the specific App names accordingly. But you still need to change the settings accordingly, for example the Artifact filters (see Release triggers) to determine the condition to trigger the specific stage. But in this way it will download all the artifacts first when you add multiple artifact sources, this will take long time to get sources...
I am trying to generate release notes from work items in Azure DevOps.
In the Release Pipelines Web Interface there is a list of changed work items since the last deployment under Work Items / Difference in Work Items.
Is there a way to access this list during the Release Job via REST API or a Release Variable?
Edit
Use the Build API - Get Work Items Between Builds method.
For arguments:
fromBuildId={fromBuildId}
List the top successful build that is retained by release
toBuildId={toBuildId}
use the build_buildid environment variable on the release agent
Original
I believe you'll use the Builds API for work items referenced on the build used in the release.
Your release should have a variable [BUILD_BUILDID] --> [###] that you can use to provide to the build API linked above.
When looking at the logs of a release pipeline, you can see the environment variables available to the pipeline by opening the Initialize job log.
I'm trying to configure Azure DevOps Release pipelines for our projects, and I have a pretty clear picture of what I want to achieve, but I'm only getting almost all the way there.
Here's what I'd like:
The build pipeline for each respective project outputs, as artifacts, all the things needed to deploy that version into any environment.
The release pipeline automatically deploys to the first environment ("dev" in our case) on each successful build, including PR builds.
For each successive environment, the release must have been deployed successfully to all previous environments. In other words, in order to deploy to the second environment ("st") it must have been deployed to the first one ("dev"), and in order to deploy to the third ("at") it must have been successfully deployed to all previous (both "dev" and "st"), etc.
All environments can have specific requirements on from what branches deployable artifacts must have been built; e.g. only artifacts built from master can be deployed to "at" and "prod".
Each successive deploy to any environment after the first one is triggered manually, by someone on a list of approvers. The list of approvers differs between environments.
The only way I've found to sort-of get all of the above working at the same time, is to automatically trigger the next environment after a successful deployment, and add a pre-deployment gate with a manual approval step. This works, except the manual approval doesn't trigger the deployment per se, but rather let an already triggered deployment start executing. This means that any release that's not approved for lifting into the next environment, is left hanging until manually dismissed.
I can avoid that by having a manual trigger instead of automatic, but then I can't enforce the flow from one environment to the next (it's e.g. possible to deploy to "prod" without waiting for successful deployments to the previous stages).
Is there any way to configure Azure DevOps Release Pipelines to do all of the things I've outlined above at once?
I think you are correct, you can only achieve that by setting automatic releases after successful release with approval gates. I dont see any other options with currect Azure DevOps capabilities.
Manual with approval gates doesnt check previous environments were successfully deployed to, unfortunately.
I hope this provides some clarity after the fact. Have you looked at YAML Pipelines In this you can specify the conditions on each stage
The stages can then have approvals on them as well.