Is there a standard way to delete successful vnext builds (PR) just after their completion?

2
votes

The most aggressive build retention policy one can set for pull request builds is described in "Clean up pull request builds"

a policy that keeps a minimum of 0 builds

Still, it means that successful PR builds (with artifacts no one will ever need) will be deleted only after the next automatic retention cleanup - usually the next day, but in reality it results in nearly two days worth of no longer needed builds.

In our particular case it seems to be desirable to find a way to clean successful PR builds ASAP due to their frequency and artifact's sheer size that may periodically strain our not yet fully organized infrastructure dedicated to PR handling (it will be significantly improved, but not as soon as we'd like to, and those successful PR builds would still remain no less of a dead weight).

And as far as I see the only way to do it would be to delete builds manually.

While it is not too difficult to implement, I'd still like to check whether there is a simpler standard way to delete successful PR builds automatically.

P.S.: There is one particularity in our heavily customized build process - we have multiple dependent artifacts. Like create A, use it to build B, create C to test B... So trying not to Publish artifacts on overall successful build with custom condition like it is suggested below is not exactly feasible.

1
tfsazure-devopsvnext

1 Answers

3
votes

Let's look at the problem from a different perspective: The problem isn't that builds are retained, the problem is that your PR builds are publishing artifacts.

You can make the Publish Artifacts steps conditional so that they don't run during PRs. Something like and(succeeded(), ne(variables['Build.Reason'], 'PullRequest')) will make the task only run if it's not a PR.