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Azure Pipelines–Build completion triggers

I’m currently migrating an existing CI/CD pipeline build in Azure DevOps from the ‘classic’ build approach to YAML templates. It was quite a journey. So expect a lot of posts the upcoming days about this topic where I share everything I learned along the way.

In our original setup we had an Azure DevOps classic pipeline that was used to create a Docker image and push it to ACR (“the CI part”). After that a release pipeline was triggered that took the image from ACR and deploys it in multiple AKS clusters (“the CD part”).

The goal was to keep this way of working and only make the switch from the ‘classic’ build approach to YAML templates. So the first thing I had to find out was how I could trigger the CD build when the CI build completed.

Let me first show you the approach that is most similar to the classic approach using ‘Build completion triggers’. Although this approach still works, it is no longer recommended. The recommended approach is to specify pipeline triggers directly within the YAML file but that is something for tomorrow.

Build completion triggers

Let’s walk through the steps required to use the Build completion trigger:

  • Open the YAML pipeline that you want to be triggered after build completion.
  • Click on ‘Edit’ to open the YAML pipeline in Edit mode

  • Click on the 3 dots and choose Triggers from the context menu

  • The Triggers screen is loaded. Here you can click on ‘+Add’ and select a build 

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