Pipeline Creation in Azure DevOps

This post is going to walk through creating a new build pipeline in Azure DevOps. This post is going to stick with a very simple example which we will build on in future posts. If you are new to this series of post check out the related posts.

Getting Started with Azure DevOps

This post will all happen from the Azure DevOps website so get logged in to your account select the project you will be working with before continuing. The project this sample is using is named Playground.

Pipeline Creation

From the project menu on the right of the site click the Pipelines option.

Since our sample project doesn’t have any pipelines setup we will see a landing page telling us to create a new pipeline. Once you have some pipelines this page is a lot more useful. Click the Create Pipeline button to continue.

The next step is to pick where our code is stored. For this sample, the code is in an Azure Repo Git repository, but as you can see Azure DevOps is pretty open about where your code is stored. As you will see from the screenshot there are a bunch of YAML based options and a very small option to use the classic editor. The classic editor is much easier to get started with, but the YAML options are getting the most attention from Microsoft and have the advantage of being stored in Git with your source so I recommend going with a YAML option even though there is more of a learning curve.

Next, select the repo this pipeline is for.

In the next step, Configure, you are given a list of templates to pick from which really helps when your new to yaml. Our sample applications are ASP.NET Core so click the Show More button and click ASP.NET Core. As you can see from the screenshot Azure DevOps can build just about anything and isn’t restricted to Microsoft based tech.

The result is the following YAML file. At this point, we aren’t doing to dive into the particulars of what the YAML is doing and go with the default. To continue to click the Save and run button.

Since the YAML is stored in the repo the save process is actually making a commit to a branch. Click the Save and run button on the commit dialog and it will save the YAML file to your branch and run the pipeline.

Pipeline Results

The following are the results from the pipeline run and it turns out to have failed. If you click the highlighted error it will take you to the detailed logs of the pipeline which will normally give you a good indication of why the pipeline failed.

The following screenshot is the result of clicking on the error. As you can see it provides a the output of the build command.

In this case line, 43 provides us with the reason the build failed. The following is the full line since the screenshot cuts it off. In this case, the issue is the agent running the build doesn’t have .NET Core 3.1 installed.

usr/share/dotnet/sdk/3.0.102/Sdks/Microsoft.NET.Sdk/targets/Microsoft.NET.TargetFrameworkInference.targets(127,5): error NETSDK1045: The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET Core 3.1. Either target .NET Core 3.0 or lower, or use a version of the .NET SDK that supports .NET Core 3.1. [/home/vsts/work/1/s/src/WebApp1/WebApp1.csproj]

Fixing the Pipeline

Click the back button in your browser to return to the pipeline results page. Click the three dots in the top right of the results page and select Edit pipeline. This will open an edit with the YAML for the build open.

Using the Tasks helper on the right side of the screen we are going to select the Use .NET Core task which will allow us to install the version of .NET Core we need to build our applications.

Enter the version of .NET Core your application needs, 3.1 in this case and hit add.

The following is the resulting YAML. Note that the above helper isn’t required and you can hand-edit the YAML if you want.

trigger:
- master

pool:
  vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

variables:
  buildConfiguration: 'Release'

steps:
- task: UseDotNet@2
  inputs:
    packageType: 'sdk'
    version: '3.1.x'

- script: dotnet build --configuration $(buildConfiguration)
  displayName: 'dotnet build $(buildConfiguration)'

Hit the Save button in the top right of the page, enter a commit message and click the Save button in the bottom right of the page. This will return you back to the edit screen for your YAML. Click the Run button on the top right of the page to start the pipeline.

This round (for the sample application) the pipeline will succeed.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully, this will give you a good jumping-off point to build your first Azure DevOps Pipeline. There is a lot a depth in Pipeline some of which I will explore in some future posts.

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Also published on Medium.