What is Azure Pipelines?
Azure Pipelines is a cloud service that you can use to automate building, testing, and deploying your code to any cloud or on-premises environment. It's a key component of Azure DevOps Services and a powerful tool for implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) workflows.
Key Concepts:
- Pipelines: Define your build, test, and release processes. These can be YAML-based for code-driven pipeline definitions or classic visual editors.
- Builds: The process of compiling your code, running unit tests, and producing artifacts ready for deployment.
- Releases: The process of deploying your build artifacts to various environments (e.g., dev, staging, production).
- Agents: The infrastructure that runs your jobs. You can use Microsoft-hosted agents or self-hosted agents.
- YAML Pipelines: Define your pipeline as code in a YAML file, which is versioned alongside your application code. This offers greater flexibility, traceability, and collaboration.
- Classic Pipelines: A visual, task-based editor for creating and managing build and release pipelines.
Core Features:
- Cross-platform support: Build and deploy on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
- Multi-language support: Works with any language, including Java, Python, Node.js, .NET, C++, and more.
- Integration with various services: Seamlessly integrate with GitHub, Azure Repos, Bitbucket, and a wide range of cloud platforms like Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
- Extensibility: Utilize a rich marketplace of extensions to add custom tasks and integrate with third-party services.
- Advanced deployment strategies: Support for canary releases, blue-green deployments, and other sophisticated release patterns.
- Intelligent testing: Run tests automatically as part of your pipeline to ensure code quality.
Getting Started with YAML Pipelines
YAML pipelines are the recommended approach for defining your CI/CD workflows. They offer a more robust and maintainable way to manage your pipelines.
A basic YAML pipeline might look like this:
trigger:
- main
pool:
vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'
steps:
- script: echo Hello, world!
displayName: 'Run a one-line script'
- script: |
echo Add another steps here,
echo you can do more than one thing!
displayName: 'Run a multi-line script'
This simple pipeline triggers on changes to the main branch, uses a Microsoft-hosted Ubuntu agent, and executes two script steps.