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Schedule – Azure Pipelines with YAML

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Last week I presented how you can create easily Azure DevOps Pipeline on YAML basis. Today I’m gonna show you how you can do this on scheduled way. (you can find the video version end of this post)

I know, several times you need to execute a scripts in every hours or days. Maybe until now you had a dedicated machine, where you did this. But from now you can eliminate that and you can use Azure DevOps Pipeline with time trigger for it.

In my post from last week (HandsOn – Azure Pipelines with YAML), you can read how you can prepare a project on GitHub and Azure DevOps. I made some tiny changes for Today. I mean, I put the code to an Azure DevOps repository. So you can use the guide from last week for preparation. Note: if you have an azure DevOps Repository, there is a fork at point 3 under Step 5. Here you should choose Azure Repos Git option.

The further steps are almost same. When you open the pipeline you can see the code we made last time.

Now we schedule our code from YAML. For this go to our Visual Studio Code where I opened the code after the git clone action. Open our YAML file. Insert the time trigger section to top of the existing YAML file.

schedules:
- cron: "* * * * *"
  displayName: Runs every minutes
  branches:
    include:
    - master
    - releases/*
    exclude:
    - releases/ancient/*
  always: true

There are three pillars here:

  1. always: true – this is important if you really want to execute this code scheduled. Without it the trigger won’t work well.
  2. cron – this is the standard crontab related scheduling. If you are not familiar with this configuration, open the https://crontab.guru in your browser which helps you to find the right configuration. Be careful with timing because if you schedule this for a special date and time – like 10AM every day, in Azure DevOps it will run 10AM every day in UTC.
  3. Last but not lease please enter a user friendly display name for scheduling. This is useful, because you can use multiple schedules for your pipeline.

Save this file, then push back to your repository. Here you should know the pipeline will run immediately when you commit the changes to repo. This is the normal behavior here.

Now, let’s check the pipeline scheduling. For this, inside Azure DevOps, navigate to your Organization > your Project > Piplelines > YAML Pipeline. Here click on the three vertical dots to see the additional options and choose the Scheduled runs.

Fantastic….you can see the configured schedulings:

Some minutes later you can see your pipeline runs according to your configured schedule.

I hope you feel this is very useful. Next time we continue the playing with Azure DevOps pipelines.

Take care… 🙂

Schedule Azure Pipeline with YAML

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HandsOn – Azure Pipelines with YAML

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Last week I published an article about the new capabilities of Azure DevOps pipelines (with YAML). As I promised we continue this topic on Today. Although the last week provided documentation contains the most important information, I feel I should show you how it works in the real life. Why? Because the documentation is not the best for that….as usual.

Scenario for today: Create a basic NodeJS project which is stored on GitHub repository. This NodeJS project is a simple script which will be executed by Azure DevOps pipeline via a YAML file.

After this “episiode” you are able to execute automatically any of your existing NodeJs script or solution in Azure DevOps pipeline. This means you will have a CICD-like solution from your existing NodeJS solution. It’s cool, isn’t it?

Additionally, I’ve decided to create a video guide for this article, which helps you to see the whole flow, step-by-step. You can find it below.

Step 1: Create a GitHub repository for your code

As usually the first step to create a private or public repository on GitHub. This is a basic steps and I assume you can do it. 🙂

Step 2: Write your basic code with YAML file

  1. Next step after GitHub repository creation to clone the repository to the local computer. For this I use Visual Studio code.
  2. Open your cloned repository and start to create the NodeJS solution.
  3. Create the following 3 files:
    1. package.json: This contains the project related information and the required package list for your solution.
    2. startPilepine.js: This is our very basic existing NodeJS solution. Later on you can replace it to your existing solution.
    3. pipeline.yaml: According to this file the Azure DevOps will build the pipeline. So this file contains the pipeline related information such as environment settings, pipeline steps, triggers.
  4. Finally, test our solution locally.

You can find the content for files here: https://github.com/cloudsteak/YAML-pipeline

Step 3: Push our solution to GitHub

When our solution is ready to use, we should push to our newly created GitHub repository. Here there is no any special steps, merely you should commit and push the changes.

Step 4: Create Azure DevOps project

Our solution is located on GitHub, so we are almost done. Now we create a project in Azure DevOps where we will create our pipeline. For this you should follow the following steps:

  1. Login to Azure DevOps. Open this links: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/ and click on Sign in to Azure DevOps link.
  2. Choose your Organization or create a new one.
  3. Inside the selected organization click on New Project button, top right corner of the screen.
  4. In the Create new project window enter the Project name, Description.
  5. Select the required visibility of this project; Public or Private. Be careful, this is not equal with the visibility of your GitHub repository.
  6. Inside Advanced section the Version control should be Git.
  7. If everything is ok, click on Create button

Step 5: Create pipeline

  1. Inside the newly created Azure DevOps project go to Pipelines section (left side menu)
  2. Then click on Create Pipeline button, middle of the screen
  3. At next screen select the GitHub (YAML) from the list
  4. Next steps to Select a repository from GitHub.
    If you are not connected from Azure DevOps to GitHub yet, you have to do it here.
    If you are connected from Azure DevOps to GitHub you can see the list of your repositories and you can choose the required one.
  5. When you select the required repository you can see the Approve & Install Azure Pipelines window where you have to grant access to your repository to Install pipelines.
  6. After this, you can start the configuration of pipeline. For this please choose the Existing Azure Pipelines YAML file options at the Configure your pipeline screen.
  7. Then a sidebar appears on the right side of the screen (Select an existing YAML file) where you must select the YAML (files from the required branch) which contains the pipeline related information. Select the pipeline.yaml then click on Continue button.
  8. Accordingly the pipeline has been created after some seconds. Here you can Run immediately it or just Save.

From this you have a Pipeline from a YAML file.

Step 6: Execute the pipeline

Great, we have a pipeline. To execute this pipeline we have now 2 (two) options:

  1. Run manually from Azure DevOps
    1. Navigate to Azure DevOps > Your organization > Your project > Pipelines > Pipelines > All
    2. Click on name of your YAML based pipeline
    3. Finally click on Run pipeline
  2. Triggered by GitHub push
    1. Modify your code your code (in Visual Studio Code)
    2. Then push the modification to GitHub repository
    3. This will trigger the pipeline to start to execute.

Step 7: Check result

This is a very simple thing.

  1. Navigate to Azure DevOps > Your organization > Your project > Pipelines > Pipelines > All
  2. Click on name of your YAML based pipeline
  3. Select the required Run from the list
  4. At the new screen click on Job node_13_x
  5. Here you can see the details of execution

We are done with the scope of scenario. 🙂

Last but not least. You can find the video, if you like the video content better:

Create Azure Pipeline from YAML

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Azure Pipelines with YAML – introduction

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I mentioned several times, my favorite area is the automation. I like to make automation stuff because that is the best way to make other’s life easier. 🙂 Maybe you remember, last year I published a series which title was E2E Python solution in DevOps (Azure DevOps).

Since then the capabilities of Azure DevOps is better than ever. I like to use it for Scrum management, code repository, CI/CD activities, etc. And two days ago Microsoft announced another cool thing: General Availability of YAML CD features in Azure Pipelines. Why is this so important? Because from now you can use your YAML knowledge to create great CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps. 🙂

As Microsoft highlighted:

YAML CD features introduces several new features that are available for all organizations using multi-stage YAML pipelines. Some of the highlights include.

Therefore I’ve decided to start to create some solutions with YAML in Azure DevOps, and I’ll provide you as a guide to use it in your daily job.

Pipelines YAML intro image

If you are not familiar in this topic, and you feel you need some “training”, you can find some useful information here:

So the next automation related post I’ll bring a YAML based pipeline solution for you to discover the capabilities of YAML based pipelines.

If you have any idea or recommendation about scenarios we should implement, feel free to contact me. And get in touch if you are struggling any automation related topic.

Thanks for reading. See you soon. 😉

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