Enhanced YAML Conversion for Azure DevOps Classic Build Pipelines

Azure DevOps YAML pipelines is the way to implement pipeline as code and version control the pipelines alongside your application code. However, among Azure DevOps users classic build pipelines are still popular due to its simple, visual ability to implement and understand faster etc. Additionally, classic pipeline agent job or individual step could be converted to YAML by using “View YAML” option available in each step/task as well as for a given agent phase. With a recent update to Azure DevOps new feature has been added to enable exporting entire classic build pipeline as YAML replacing the “View YAML” feature. This is a great improvement feature added to Azure DevOps as “View YAML” feature was only able to consider information in web UI when generating YAML out of classic pipeline, which at times generated incorrect YAML. With the new export YAML feature, now you can derive a reliable YAML implementation of a given classic pipeline. This would help people to implement pipeline quickly using classic pipeline UI and convert and obtain a YAML, which would help pipeline as code adoption easier. Let’s look at how we can use this new export to YAML feature.