Selecting Particular Source CI YAM Pipeline Build While Manually Triggering a YAML CD/Release Pipeline

In classic release pipelines in Azure DevOps you can pick which build to use in the linked build artifacts, easily at the create time. The new norm of implementing pipelines with Azure DevOps is becoming YAML way, allowing to keep your pipelines as code and version controlled. How to Separate CI and CD considerations to individual YAML pipelines was discussed in the post “Trigger Deployment YAML Pipeline Once YAML Build Completed”. Therefore, it is important to know how we can select a particular build, when we trigger a deployment/CD YAML pipeline manually. Let’s compare a classic pipeline triggering manually and YAML CD pipeline triggering manually to understand the difference.

Trigger Deployment YAML Pipeline Once YAML Build Completed

Now it is possible to implement multi stage pipelines with YAML facilitating the implementation of deployment pipelines as well with YAML instead of classic release pipelines in Azure DevOps. However, having build and deployment steps all together in a single pipeline script is not ideal as it looks bit not a nice implementation from my point of view. With the possibility of triggering another YAML pipeline based on completion of another YAML pipeline, it is possible to separate the Build and Deployment concerns into two different YAML scripts implementing two different pipelines. Let’s have a quick look at how we can trigger a YAML deployment pipeline based on another YAML build pipeline.

Auto Generating CD Build/Release Pipeline Targeting Azure App Service for MVC Web Application

VSTS allows great flexibility with it’s new web based build and release management features. You have several templates which can be used to create build and release definitions you need quickly. Lots of out of the box tasks allow you to further customize your definitions to support the steps that you need to perform during a build or a deployment. Visual Studio Marketplace is getting more and more components added to it, allowing you to find a task for almost any build deploy step you may require to perform. Taking the steps to the next level, you can now even generate your build/release pipeline with Visual Studio 2017, after adding the extension Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio.

Let’s walkthrough the steps of generating a CD pipeline for an MVC Web Application, to allow it to be deployed to Azure App Service.