How to extend an Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline Template
If you need to control what is allowed during your deployment, extending the YAML Templates is the easiest way to know what is being done on your deployments.
Azure DevOps YAML Templates
YAML Templates are the smartest way to create your pipelines. It allows you to break down the pipelines into small pieces reusing your logic, which leads to some best practices as Don't Repeat Yourself and Dependency Inversion.
It’s also possible to use the Declarative instead of the Imperative approach, therefore who will consume your pipelines does not need to know the details of how to deploy an application, but just say what is necessary to deploy.
With these principles being correctly applied, it is possible to build a reliable and robust way to deploy new applications, but who will consume it doesn’t need to be a DevOps expert.
Creating an Azure DevOps YAML Templates
Parameters on Azure DevOps YAML Templates
On top of the template, the first section is parameters . As our goal is to make the templates reusable, makes complete sense to have a way to change values according to which application is consuming the template. To keep it simple in this example, it was parametrized the application name.
parameters:
- name: applicationName
type: stringStages on Azure DevOps YAML Templates
To have an extendible template, it must be created on the level of the stages. This example has two of them, one for build and one more for development environment.
Below you can check the full template script:
Extending Azure DevOps YAML Templates
Configuring triggers on Azure DevOps YAML Templates
On top of the consumer file, in our case azure-pipelines.yml , we need to declare the triggers of the pipeline. It is mandatory to include at least one value for branch(it can be * if needed), or none . You can also set the path where your files are, and your pipeline will run only when those files change.
trigger:
branches:
include:
- main
- develop
paths:
include:
- src/*Referencing Azure DevOps YAML Templates
To extend a template, you need to provide the relative path for your template file. In this example, there is a templates directory with the file template.yml so on the consumer file, it’s necessary to provide the template path in the format ./templates/template.yml .
We also need to provide the parameter defined in our template. To this, you just need to add the parameters section right below the template, the name of the parameter, and of course, the value for it. Below there is the complete “consumer” file.
Conclusion
In this post, I introduced the basic concepts of how to extend Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines. This is easy to implement but can yield good fruits in future implementations.
In future articles, I will deep dive into this subject and show the full potential of this approach :).
