Re-usable Templates for Azure Pipelines

Some re-usable Azure Pipelines snippets I use acrossed my Azure Pipelines.

Name	Template
Set Custom Variable	steps/set-custom-variable.yml
Combined Docker login, build, push and logout Tasks	steps/docker-build-push.yml
Lock Azure Container Registory Image (makes immutable)	steps/lock-acr-image.yml
Deploy Container to Azure App Service	steps/deploy-app-service.yml

References

• Official Docs - Azure DevOps > Template types & usage
• Example pipeline - julie-ng/azure-nodejs-demo/azure-pipelines.yml

Setup - Include Library

In your azure-pipelines.yml file for your project, add a reference to this repository:

# File: azure-pipelines.yml

resources:
  repositories:
    - repository: templates # for reference
      type: github
      name: julie-ng/azure-pipelines-templates
      ref: refs/heads/master      

Note: @templates suffix always refers to repository name from setup as described above.

Set Custom Variable

Sometimes it's helpful to set a custom variable at runtime based on output. For example, you need project version or the git commit of the build. This task encapsulates the clunky ##vso[task.setvariable…] syntax for you.

For example, here we set the git-sha variable to output of git rev-parse --short HEAD command:

# File: azure-pipelines.yml

steps:
- template: steps/set-custom-variable.yml@templates
  parameters:
    variableName: git-sha
    command: 'git rev-parse --short HEAD'				

The result, for example 8cd076e may be useful for logging and auditing your project by tagging images.

Combined Docker login, build, push and logout Tasks

This template combines the following docker tasks:

• registry login
• build and tag image
• push image with tag(s)
• registry logout

The example below takes the $(git-sha) variable and uses it as a Docker tag. This example pushes a single image with tagged both by its git sha and the version 1.0.0

steps:
- template: steps/docker-build-push.yml@templates
  parameters:
    registryConnectionName: 'acr-or-docker-hub-connection'
    imageName: 'my-app' 
    tagsAsMultilineString: |
      $(git-sha)
      '1.0.0'

Note the parameter is called tagsAsMultilineString which is due to limitations of Azure DevOps. A YAML object would make more sense to me. But the underlying Azure DevOps task only takes multi-line strings 🤷‍♀️

Lock Azure Container Registory Image

This template locks an image in the Azure Container Registry preventing it from being deleted.

Example use:

steps:
- template: steps/lock-acr-image.yml@templates
  parameters:
    azureArmConnection: 'azure-arm-connection'
    acrRegistryName: 'myregistry'
    imageName: 'my-app'
    imageTag: 'v1.0'
    condition: succeeded() # optional

Deploy Container to Azure App Service

Deploys a container to Azure App Service, Web App for Containers. Works for both Docker Hub and Azure Container Registry images.

Example use:

steps:
  - template: steps/deploy-app-service.yml@templates
    parameters:
      ARMConnectionName: 'arm-service-connection'
      dockerImage: 'image-name:v1.0'
      appName: 'myapp-dev'