does skip ci work with build validation pipelines? - azure-devops

I have a branch policy for build validation. As a final step i am wanting to update a file in the pull request and push it into the branch. it doesn't appear that [skip ci] works for these build triggers. is there another way to accomplish this quality gate?
deeper part of scenario. pull request is building a docker image, and tagging with git hash. i'm updating a yaml file with the new tag so i only have to build the image once. at some point i want to set up another pipeline that will deploy this image based off a successful run of this pipeline(build validation)

does skip ci work with build validation pipelines?
The answer is No.
First, I need to indicate that this is two different scenarios. As we know, the [skip ci] or [ci skip] is used to skip running CI, like the option
Enable continuous integration on UI:
However, our current scenario is branch policy for build validation instead of CI. This is very different from CI, although they seem to be doing the same build task. Branch policy is to protect our branches from being corrupted by incorrect submit. This is a verified operation instead of continuous integration.
Check the document Skipping CI for individual commits for some more details.
So, this is two different scenarios, we could not apply the CI settings to the branch policy.
Second, just like I said in the first point, Branch policy is used to protect our branches, any commit requires validation by branch pliocy, although sometimes we can know that our modifications don't require build validation, but we're not sure if there are any where we overlook that cause our target branch to be broken. Skip unnecessary verification will bring us some construction convenience, but with the risk measurement it brings, these conveniences are negligible, so we don't recommend skipping the verification of the branch office strategy.
Hope this helps.

Related

Azure Devops Build Pipeline from PR Trigger get source branch

So ive been building a build pipeline, that is triggered whenever a pull request is done to master, so we have a branch policy such that the only change to the master branch is through pull requests.
I want the build pipeline to checkout the source branch of the PR and do some commits to the source branch as part of the build pipeline. I thought i could just use the Build.SourceBranchName variable but when the pipeline is triggered the SourceBranchName is master. So I could not use it.
Are there any easy ways of doing this?
I want the build pipeline to checkout the source branch of the PR
To checkout the source branch of the PR, you could use the predefined system variables about PR:
System.PullRequest.SourceBranch and System.PullRequest.TargetBranch
To get the branch that is being reviewed in a pull request, we should select the variable System.PullRequest.SourceBranch.
now the issue becomes that because of a new commit to the PR it runs
the pipeline again, this should not happen since i have [skip ci] in
the commit message.
As we know, the [skip ci] or [ci skip] is used to skip running CI, like the option
Enable continuous integration on UI:
However, our current scenario is branch policy for build validation instead of CI. This is very different from CI, although they seem to be doing the same build task. Branch policy is to protect our branches from being corrupted by incorrect submit. This is a verified operation instead of continuous integration.
Check the document Skipping CI for individual commits for some more details.
So, this is two different scenarios, we could not apply the CI settings to the branch policy.
Second, Branch policy is used to protect our branches, any commit requires validation by branch pliocy, although sometimes we can know that our modifications don't require build validation, but we're not sure if there are any where we overlook that cause our target branch to be broken. Skip unnecessary verification will bring us some construction convenience, but with the risk measurement it brings, these conveniences are negligible, so we don't recommend skipping the verification of the branch office strategy.
If skipping Build Validation is your insistence, you can try LJ’s suggestion.

Avoid rebuilding artifacts in Jenkins multibranch pipelines

TL;DR
How do I avoid rebuilding artifacts on master when a feature is merged without creating multiple pipelines per project? Where do I access the information about which branch was merged?
More Info
I run Jenkins to build many projects stored in two different VCSs (Gitlab, Bitbucket). Auto-discovery for both VCSs work and create multi-branch pipelines for every project/branch/PR containing a Jenkinsfile (Gitlab Branch Source Plugin, Bitbucket Branch Source Plugin).
Build artifacts get produced and stored on every build (e.g. docker images pushed to registry).
As I follow a feature branch workflow, these features get eventually merged into master, master will then be deployed in irregular intervals.
When doing the merge, there is an artifact already built and stored for this code(see appendix:1). It was built for the feature branch the code originated from (e.g. container mysuperapp:feat-add-better-things-3). I would like to take this artifact and promote it as the new master artifact (e.g. mysuperapp:master), avoiding a rebuild (and unit + integration testing everything).
But, merging a feature branch just kicks off a new build pipeline on branch master without any information about the merged branch (see appendix:2). This is correct behavior concerning master (new commit(s) where pushed) but prevents me from reacting to the merged branch (e.g. the aforementioned promoting or even just deleting unused artifacts). Is there any way to get the information, which branch was merged?
I am aware, that I can create a new pipeline listening for PR webhooks from my VCSs, running a pipeline to do the promotion and ignore builds on master completely. But this moves visibility of this process to a different pipeline and requires additional pipelines for projects, e.g. reducing the advantage of auto-discovery to 50% (have to create these merge pipelines for each project).
How can I keep the advantages of auto-discovery and visibility of executed steps while also executing something on a merge?
Ideas: Tag artifacts differently, but how (needs to be able to clean up correctly)? Parameterize pipelines and setup a single merge pipeline which re-triggers the pipeline 'push on master' with parameters of the merged branch. But can this be done without having to setup the webhooks for every project? Ask the VCSs via REST about which branch belonged to a commit?
Greets and thanks for the help you all! This may be a complicated one, but it would be so cool to get this to work. It's the last barrier for me to enable continuos delivery for a lot of projects!
Appendix:
1: I am also aware, that to have consistent builds, I have to enforce --ff-only merges. This question is not about the pitfalls of git but rather about the way to go with Jenkins.
2: Git provides me with the parent commits, I can easily find out, which commit was merged. But, especially using "Delete branch after merge", leaves me without the branch ref in git. Tagging my docker images with commits instead of branches leaves me with backtracking the last commit on each build to delete the old, obsolete build.

Automatically Tagging a PR Build in Azure Devops

I have branch validation in the form of a PR Build, which means I have duplicated my original build and removed some steps (such as pushing to my docker registry).
I would prefer to simply be able to automatically add a tag / some kind of identifier to a PR build and exclude the step on the original build using custom conditions.
Does anyone know if this is possible, and if so how to achieve it? I'd really rather not duplicate each and every build.
If I understand your question correctly, you would like to run a build step based on a custom condition. In this case, the custom condition is whether the build is a PR build or not.
You can check the pre-defined build variables available in Azure Devops here and you can see that there is a Build.Reason variable.
I am listing a few variables here.
Manual: A user manually queued the build.
IndividualCI: Continuous integration (CI) triggered by a Git push or a TFVC check-in.
PullRequest: The build was triggered by a Git branch policy that requires a build.
You can specify the condition in custom condition settings of your build step like this.
More examples available in the docs

Resetting build policy on branch update in VSTS / Azure DevOps

I'm using a build policy on one of my Azure DevOps git branches.
Is there any way of requiring a manually triggered branch build policy be run again if the source branch is updated?
My branch policy is set to Manual trigger. We use Manual instead of Automatic to reduce the number of builds (we use self hosted build server) running on our CI server as we typically open PR's early to provide feedback and facilitate conversation around code.
If the trigger was set to automatic, then any time source branch is updated a new build is queued. This isn't case with Manual. I had situation where build policy passed but then a further commit was made to branch and the reviewer approved. But the build was not manually triggered again and the last commit & push introduced a bug. I'd like the build validation policy to either reset or fail every time the source branch is updated similar to how code reviewer votes are reset after a push.
Is this possible?
I do not think this is currently possible, it has been raised on the Developer community as a feature request / issue, so I would encourage you to up-vote this here.
A solution for our scenario (too many builds were being queued, because Code Reviews come back with changes) was to use Pull Request drafts.
Sprint 143 - Draft Pull Request
When creating a PR, you can click Create as Draft in the drop down beside the Create button.

How to auto merge pull request on github?

Is it possible to merge pull request automaticaly to master branch on github after success of travis test webhook?
You can use Mergify to do this.
It allows to configure rules and define criteria for your pull request to be automatically merged. In your case, setting something like "Travis check is OK and one reviewer approved the PR" would allow the PR to be automatically merged.
(Disclosure: I'm part of the Mergify team.)
You can most probably add an after_success action to your .travis.yml that would merge the PR using GitHub API. I do not know of any ready to use script for this, but there is no reason for it to be hard. Special care needed for authentication ...
GitHub recently shipped this auto-merge feature in beta. To use this, you can enable it in the repo settings. Just keep in mind you will need to add branch protection rules as well.
See the documentation for more info.
https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team#latest/github/collaborating-with-issues-and-pull-requests/automatically-merging-a-pull-request
I work on a project that requires pull requests to be up to date with the target branch, and also to have passed all the checks before merging.
This means we can often be waiting for checks to finish, only to find a new commit has been made to the target branch, which requires the pull request to be synchronised and the checks to run all over again. I wanted a simple app to merge the PR automatically once the checks are successful, so I created one.
Mergery is:
Free, including for private repositories.
Fast. It's event-driven, it doesn't run on a schedule.
Simple. No configuration required. Just label your PRs with automerge.