Azure Pipelines: A Comprehensive Guide

Azure Pipelines is a powerful tool for automating and streamlining your software development workflow. It allows you to build, test, and deploy your code with ease.

With Azure Pipelines, you can create custom pipelines that fit your specific needs, including continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.

You can integrate Azure Pipelines with a wide range of tools and services, including GitHub, Azure DevOps, and Jenkins.

To get started with Azure Pipelines, you'll need to have the Azure CLI installed on your machine. You can install it and follow the steps to set up your pipeline.

Forking a repository into your GitHub account is a great way to get started with Azure DevOps. You can fork the Pipelines Java repo into your GitHub account in just a few clicks.

To create a new pipeline, sign into Azure DevOps, select your project, and navigate to the Pipelines screen. From there, click Create new pipeline and select GitHub as the source code location.

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You can then follow the steps to select your GitHub account and choose the Pipelines Java sample repo. Azure Pipelines will automatically create a Maven pipeline template for you.

Here are the basic steps to create a pipeline in Azure DevOps:

Setting workers to "1" in CI environments is a good idea, as it prioritizes stability and reproducibility. This ensures each test gets the full system resources, avoiding potential conflicts.

Running tests sequentially can be beneficial, but if you have a powerful self-hosted CI system, you may want to enable parallel tests.

Tasks are the building blocks that define pipeline automation in Azure Pipelines.

Tasks are packaged scripts or procedures that are abstracted as a set of inputs. This abstraction makes it easy to define a task with specific requirements.

To add tasks to a pipeline, you can select from a variety of options, but each task can also add specific demands.

Demands define prerequisites that must be installed on the agent in order to perform the task. This ensures that the task can only be executed on agents that meet the required conditions.

Here are some key characteristics of tasks in Azure Pipelines:

Tasks are executed sequentially within a job, making it easy to define complex pipeline automation.

To create a .Net Core pipeline using a YAML file, you'll need to fork a repository from GitHub. Click on the project name from the dashboard, then go to Pipelines and select New Pipeline. Before proceeding, fork the repo from https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/pipelines-dotnet-core.

To get started, choose GitHub as your source code location and authorize Azure Pipelines to access your repository. You may be redirected to GitHub to sign in, so enter your credentials. Click on Authorize AzurePipelines and select your repository from the list.

Once you've authorized access, you'll see the Configure tab where you can select ASP.NET Core. This will create a basic pipeline as a YAML file, which you can then save and run. Be aware that you might receive an error stating "No hosted parallelism has been purchased or granted", which requires filling out a form to request a free parallelism grant.

If this caught your attention, see: Azure Pipelines Yaml

To manage your pipeline as code, you can use the azure-pipelines.yml configuration file. This file specifies the structure of your pipeline and is versioned with your code. Any changes to the pipeline configuration can be managed via pull requests and build policies.

To work with pipelines as YAML code, you'll need to configure Azure Pipelines to point to your Git repo, define your build process using azure-pipelines.yml, and push the YAML code to your version control repository. This will trigger automatic build and deploy, and you can monitor results.

You can integrate package management into your CI/CD pipelines to produce packages that external users can consume.

You can publish NuGet, npm, Maven, or Python packages as artifacts to the built-in Azure Pipelines package management repository, or any other package management repository you choose.

Azure Pipelines allows you to publish packages as artifacts, which can then be consumed by external users.

For more information about Azure Artifacts, you can check out the Artifacts in Azure Pipelines section.

Recommended read: Azure Repository

Azure Pipelines offers several types of triggers to automate pipeline runs.

Triggers can be categorized into three main types: scheduled triggers, event-based triggers, and pipeline triggers.

Scheduled triggers start a pipeline on a fixed schedule, allowing you to run your pipeline at regular intervals.

Event-based triggers start a pipeline in response to an event, such as creating a pull request or pushing code to a specific branch.

For example, tests will run on push or pull request on branches main/master.

Pipeline triggers start one pipeline upon completion of another, creating a workflow of connected pipelines.

Here are the three types of triggers supported by Azure Pipelines:

Pipeline configuration is where the magic happens. You can create and manage multiple pipelines from a single interface, making it easy to automate and streamline your development workflow.

Azure Pipelines can be triggered manually or automatically, with the ability to run pipelines on demand or schedule them to run at specific times.

Pipelines can be configured to run on a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, and macOS, giving you flexibility and control over your deployment process.

Each pipeline consists of one or more stages, which are essentially sequential steps that a pipeline runs through. Stages can be thought of as a series of tasks that need to be completed before moving on to the next step.

A pipeline can have multiple agents, which are essentially workers that run tasks and stages. Agents can be managed and scaled as needed, allowing you to adjust to changing workload demands.

Azure Pipelines also supports parallelism, allowing you to run multiple stages in parallel, which can significantly speed up your deployment process.

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Azure Pipelines offers a range of tools and features to help you set up and manage Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines. You can define pipelines using either the user interface or YAML syntax.

To configure a CI/CD pipeline using YAML, you'll need to create an azure-pipelines.yml file. This file will contain the necessary steps to build, test, and deploy your code. For example, you can use the .Net Core code from the MicrosoftDocs repository as a starting point.

Azure Pipelines can be managed using Azure CLI, which provides a range of commands to run, update, and show pipeline details. Some common commands include `az pipelines run`, `az pipelines update`, and `az pipelines show`. These commands can be used to automate pipeline management tasks and streamline your CI/CD process.

Here are some common Azure CLI commands for managing pipelines:

Continuous integration and delivery are critical components of any CI/CD pipeline. Azure Pipelines can execute automated tests as part of the CI process, ensuring quality and catching bugs early in the development cycle.

GitHub Actions is a game-changer for automating your CI/CD pipeline. It's a free service from GitHub that allows you to create custom workflows to automate tasks such as building, testing, and deploying your code.

You can trigger GitHub Actions on push events, pull requests, or schedules, making it easy to automate your pipeline. For example, you can trigger a workflow on every push to your main branch to ensure that your code is always deployable.

GitHub Actions uses YAML files to define workflows, which makes it easy to read and write. This is evident in the example workflow file that we created earlier, which is just a few lines of YAML code.

You can also use GitHub Actions to deploy your application to a variety of platforms, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This is made possible by the numerous pre-built actions available in the GitHub Actions marketplace.

GitHub Actions integrates seamlessly with other GitHub features, such as GitHub Pages and GitHub Packages. This makes it easy to automate tasks such as building and deploying your website or publishing your package.

Explore further: Azure Devops Pipeline Trigger

Managing your CI/CD setup is crucial for a smooth development process. Azure Pipelines can be managed using Azure CLI with the 'az pipelines' command.

You can run the pipeline using the 'az pipelines run' command. For example, to run the pipeline named 'neerajks77.pipelines-dotnet-core' on the 'master' branch, you would use the following command: az pipelines run –name neerajks77.pipelines-dotnet-core –branch master –output table.

To update an existing pipeline, you can use the 'az pipelines update' command. For instance, to update the pipeline named 'neerajks77.pipelines-dotnet-core' with a new description and name, you would use the following command: az pipelines update –name neerajks77.pipelines-dotnet-core –description “rename this pipeline” –new-name varonis.pipelines-dotnet-core –output table.

Azure Pipelines can also be managed using the Azure DevOps web interface. To view the details of an existing pipeline, you can click on the pipeline name in the Azure Pipelines dashboard.

Here are some common Azure CLI commands for managing pipelines:

Managing pipeline permissions is also important. To grant permissions to a pipeline, you can use the Azure CLI command 'az pipelines grant'. For example, to grant permissions to the pipeline named 'neerajks77.pipelines-dotnet-core', you would use the following command: az pipelines grant –name neerajks77.pipelines-dotnet-core –permissions read,write.

Broaden your view: Azure Grant