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.
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
I have created a c++ pipeline where the output of the build pipeline is published to drop container. The structure is the following
drop/v1.0.0/Release/MyService.dll
drop/v1.1.0/Release/MyService.dll
drop/v1.1.0/Release/MyService.dll
My engineers will need to view drop folder and according to the version that needs to be manually deployed to a client the will download the dll file.
As far as I understand there is not any way to view them under Artifacts (what a shame). I go to the project settings under Storage but I cannot view them either there. Only place that I am able to find them is under the pipeline run and then I have to find in which version of the pipeline run a specific service version was produced. This is a maze. We have dozens of c++ projects and we have to keep track of which pipeline version run of each project matches the service version.
Is there any way to be able to access them like in a folder structure?
You could use Builds - List via rest API to get all the builds for a pipeline, then use : Artifacts - List rest API to get all the artifacts for a build. It will list all the download URL for artifacts, then you could download them together or choose the one you want to download.
Besides, you could use the publishLocation argument in publish build artifacts task to copy the artifacts to a file share (FilePath). And the file share must be accessible from the agent running the pipeline. In this way you could publish all your artifacts to the file share you want for better management.
In addition, you could also use Universal Package task to publish your artifacts to your feed for better review.
I am looking for hosting .exe files in Azure Devops. It seems to don't have feature similar to how we host executable or build files in GitHub for other people to download. Do we have such kind of feature to host the executables and have the latest commit tagged?
You can try publishing the executable or build files as Build Artifacts in Azure devops build pipeline.
You can create a pipeline in azure devops and using Publish build artifacts task to store the executable or build files in azure pipeline
See example here to create a classic azure pipeline. See Here for yaml pipeline example.
When you run the pipeline. You will see the commit hash and the files uploaded in the highlighted field of the build summary page shown in below screenshot. And you download the files from there.
You can retain this artifacts by Clicking retain in the pipeline run. See below
You can also change the retention policy for your pipeline. See here for more information.
Go the Project settings page-->Settings under Pipeline. See below:
Is it possible to copy files from Azure files shares to azure artifacts using build pipeline task?
Yes it is possible. What you need is actually download files for Azure Files and publish them to Azure Artifacts. Please check this topic where is shown a way how to download files from Azure Files.
Azure Artifacts is a package feed and thus it depends what kind of package you want to publish, so confoguration may differ. But if you want to publish this as build/pipeline artofacts you may simply use regular tasks.
I have a file which I have created manually on my local computer. I need it in several Azure DevOps pipelines.
I want to use it as an "Artifact".
I know how to publish artifacts from within an Azure DevOps Pipeline, but this specific file I just want to upload from my computer. How can I do it?
How to manually publish a file to Azure Artifacts?
As we know, the essence of Artifact is the storage of a shared file. We can roughly get this information from the Publish build artifacts task:
But the default value of Artifact publish location is Azure Pipelines:
This is a shared place set up on Azure.
Update:
Thanks hey sharing:
We could upload from local to the shared place with AZ command line, like:
az artifacts universal publish --organization https://dev.azure.com/example/ --feed my_feed --name my-artifact-name --version 0.0.1 --description "Test Description" --path
Now let us return to the first sentence we started with "the essence of Artifact is the storage of a shared file", so we could create a shared place/folder to save the file. It is now seen as "Artifact". Then we just need make sure other pipelines could access this shared place/folder.
For example, we could create a folder on the server where our private agent is located, then we just need to copy your file to that folder. Now, we could use it when we build the pipeline with private agent. Obviously this is not limited to local folders, we can also create a network folder, only need to ensure that other pipelines can access it.
Hope this helps.
You have to push it through your package manager like NuGet, npm or anything else. But I guess better option would be commit and push this single file to specific repo (if this file is specific to single project) or common repo like "Utilities" (if you gonna reuse it across many projects) and then download this repo (or just file) in your pipeline.