Manual Trigger on Azure Pipelines Stages (YAML)

13
votes

I'm setting up a pipeline using Azure Pipelines YAML format. I have created 3 stages: Build, Staging, and Production. As the names suggest, the Build stage builds the project and publishes the build artifacts. The Staging stage deploys to the Staging environment and the Production stage deploys to the Production environment.

In the Environments section of my project, I have added a check for the Production environment so that I can approve the deployment before going live.

The way that my pipeline works is that both Staging and Production stages are triggered automatically after the Build stage is finished. What I don't like about this is that when developers deploy their code to Staging, they need a couple of days to test it on Staging before pushing their code to Production. So, until then, my pipeline keeps running and waiting for my approval. The spinner at the top-left corner keeps spinning and the "Duration" field keeps passing.

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Is there any ways that develpers manually trigger the Production stage whenever they are ready instead of the Build stage triggering it?

5
azure-devopsyamlazure-pipelines
It doesn't fix the problem, but you can have the "Production" stage use a dependsOn condition on the "Staging" stage. That will ensure that it does not wait or try to deploy to Production until after it has successfully deployed to Staging. This gets more valuable as you add automated testing. – qid
@Sidah Merzouk was posted an announcement on Microsoft blogs about this in October 2020. However no information since then... devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/… – Major

5 Answers

11
votes

Manual stages in yaml pipeline is not available currently. This feature request has been submitted to Microsoft. You can go and vote it up or submit a new one.

There are workarounds to achieve this.

You can move your staging and production stages to Classic Web UI Release Pipeline. Manually trigger a stage is available in Web UI Release pipeline. Please check here for more information.

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Another way to achieve this is to separate your yaml pipeline into two yaml pipelines(stage pipeline and production pipeline). And disable CI build for production pipeline( in the pipeline edit page, click on the 3dots on the top right corner and choose triggers. Please refer to below pics).

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So that you can manually run production pipeline after Developer done with their tests.

11
votes

You can specify which stage you want to run.

When you click "Run pipeline", click on "Stages to run":

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Now choose which staged will run:

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7
votes

I think there's a better way. You can add a pipeline variable which can can be overridden when starting the pipeline.

You have to add a new variable to your pipeline and chose 'Let users override this value when running this pipeline'.

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In your pipeline add a condition to your stage such as:

condition: and(succeeded(), or(eq(variables['Build.SourceBranch'], 'refs/heads/master'), eq(variables['DEPLOY_PROD'], 'true')))

Now whenever you want a build to deploy to Production you start the build and then override the variable from here:

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Set the value to 'true' and your build will trigger the stage you want.

1
votes

you can set the trigger to none to disable CI and only trigger it manual

trigger: none
0
votes

Yes it can be done. We do not do it in the yaml directly. But instead we add environment in YAML. And on environment we add manual trigger.

 environment: 'smarthotel-dev'

Environment and triggers are managed through UI.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/environments?view=azure-devops