I was playing with Azure Build pipelines. My Goal was that Developer should be able to create a Build Pipeline for their project. But he/she will not be creating it via Azure DevOps console, instead, they would Trigger a build job which would create Build pipelines for them. I was able to achieve it by having a common Template.json and invoking it using PowerShell scripts.
But I see that we can create a build pipeline by having an azure-pipelines.yaml in our repo. So I have two issues which I am struggling to face.
An Azure pipeline job that will read the azure-pipelines.yaml and create a build pipeline for the user.
Read the Azure-pipelines.yaml file which is kept inside the sub directories in the repo.
Appreciate your help.
Thanks.
Resolved :)
Created a powershell script which uses the json file which was exported from a existing pipeline job.
The JSON file will be using the azure-pipelines.yml file to create the tasks.
The Powershell script updates the json file and makes a rest call to create a pipeline.
The documentation is very poor . I was unable to find documentation on creation of pipeline through code . I Checked the Request body while saving the pipeline from which I was able to get the details to refer the yml file .
You can use AzurePipelinesPS to Get-APBuildDefinition and Publish-APBuildDefinition.
The functions use return and post json objects. I modify the json templates with tokens and update them are needed. Format-APTemplate will replace the tokens in the json template.
There are functions for release pipelines as well; Get-APReleaseDefinition and Publish-APReleaseDefinition.
Related
We have an Azure DevOps Pipeline defined as a template in a .yml file, and would like to use this to build 100+ projects.
There is zero parameterization to do, and the template essentially just runs against the project repo as-is.
Normally, we would just go into each of those project repos and create an azure-pipelines.yml file and reference the template pipeline, easy.
However, I would like to know if we can avoid creating these azure-pipelines.yml in each of the 100+ project repos. Is there some way to just run the template against 100+ repos, but as separate pipelines?
No.
YAML pipelines are based upon the YAML being stored in the application's repo, as code, alongside the application code. You can pull in templates from other repos, but you can't have one pipeline that is automatically valid for any repo.
Trying to use one template to build 100+ applications without the possibility of pinning the template to a specific version on an application by application basis is setting yourself up for a nightmare at some point in the future, when the template changes in such a way that it's no longer valid for a subset of your 100 applications.
I have exported my pipeline from Azure Devops. This results in a json file I can import to create a new build definition. Is there a schema definition that defines this file. I would like to edit it (using VS) and a schema serve as documentation-instead of hacking it.
There's yamlschema endpoint in Azure DevOps REST API that returns schema for YAML pipeline:
GET https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/_apis/distributedtask/yamlschema?api-version=5.1
Seems like this is where azure pipelines extension takes it from.
I use vscode and I'm trying out the yaml extension. However, I found there is also an azure pipeline extension, but the yaml extension is more popular.
In order for me to get azure pipelines working on the yaml extension, I was able to find the json schema that azure pipelines used here. I referenced using the raw file, but there are still bugs here and there.
On the https://www.schemastore.org/json/ there are a lot of schemas, and especially for Azure Devops Pipelines
The file tasks.schema.json seems a schema definition for the tasks in pipeline. And this repo(https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-tasks) includes examples on how we write tasks which will help you write other tasks which can be uploaded to your account or server.
I'm new to Azure DevOps and I'm trying to understand how to package a release of a PowerShell script project I'm working on.
I'm previously familiar with GitHub and the manual process for drafting a new release of my project repo. I'm now experimenting with Azure DevOps and what I want to achieve is a similar output to GitHub where my repo of PowerShell scripts are packaged into a zip file which I can publish for release.
I'm not familiar with the pipeline process in Azure DevOps or YAML as a newbie to proper release cycle tools. Previously I've just created scripts and shared them simply as they are or dropped them into a GitHub repo and manually packaged a release. I'm not likely to be turning out large numbers of builds and so have never had to come at this from an automated standpoint which seems to be the way Azure is driving me unless I'm missing something?
It's pretty simple. I prefer to do this using the old-fashing GUI (hint: there is a link when starting a new Build Pipeline that says Use the classic editor), and then convert to YAML after I get my Build Pipeline working.
1) Create your standard Build Pipeline.
2) Add the step to ZIP your files
3) Add properties to that Archive step. Specify the source to zip and target where you want the zip file to end up at.
4) Lastly, convert that single step to a YAML step by clicking in the upper-right corner on the link View YAML.
There are a lot of steps I am leaving out, but I hope this leads you into the right direction.
Is it possible to export all build and release definitions from VSTS in a single go ?
I know it was possible with TFS,
Is it possible to Export TFS 2010 Build Definitions?
Unlike TFS you could use tfpt command line. In Azure DevOps, the simple way is using Rest API to do this.
You could use list build/release definition first, it should return a json file.
Normally, when you import the JSON file, you will get a new build definition.
Besides, if you are using YAML builds which will configure your CI process as code. You could directly copy .yml files.
The release definitions are the same as build.
Well, by the same token, you can use Azure Devops API to export those.
List build definitions
List release definitions
Is there a way to export all Build and/or Release Definitions at once in Azure DevOps, instead of doing it one by one ?
Thank you.
You can do that by calling Azure DevOps Pipelines REST API. Start by query all build and release definitions, and iterate on each of the definitions to get the JSON detail of the definition.
But if your build is using YAML file, then the build definition will only container definition of where to search the YAML file and also the variable and trigger settings.