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Azure Pipelines - Failed to download task 'Download'

I’m working on converting an Azure DevOps Release pipeline to a yaml pipeline. As a first step in my pipeline I want to download the build artifacts so I can use them in my release pipeline. However using this task resulted in an error message. Let's find out what was causing this…

You can download an artifact in your pipeline through the ‘Download Pipeline Artifacts task’. You can use this task as a step in your pipeline or you can use the shorthand ‘download’ alias:

Executing the pipeline above resulted in the following error message:

Failed to download task 'Download'. Error No task definition found matching ID 30f35852-3f7e-4c0c-9a88-e127b4f97211 and version 1.0.0. You must register the task definition before uploading the package.

This error message is quite misleading and would make you think that there is something wrong with downloading the ‘Download’ task (which turned out not to be the issue).

Let’s take a closer look at our yaml pipeline. We have set our pipeline resource name to ‘example_ci’. Notice the underscore:

When we refer to this resource in our download task I've used 'example-ci':

So the problem was caused by the fact that I was referring to a resource that wasn’t defined (because I made a typo). The fix was easy, I updated the download step to use the correct resource name:

Problem solved!

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