Azure Pipelines–Templates Part II

I'm currently migrating an existing CI/CD pipeline build in Azure DevOps from the ‘classic’ build approach to YAML files. Yesterday I talked about the concept of templates as a replacement for Task groups in the 'classic' pipeline.

I showed how to create a template and use it inside your YAML pipeline. What I didn’t mention is that next to ‘including’ a template it is also possible to ‘inherit’ from a template.

Let’s find out how to do this.

Extending a template

To ‘inherit’ from a template, we should let a pipeline extend from an extendible template.

To have an extendible template, it must be created on the level of the stages:

	parameters:
	- name: yesNo
	type: boolean
	stages:
	- stage: development
	pool:
	vmImage: windows-latest
	jobs:
	- deployment:
	environment: development
	strategy:
	runOnce:
	deploy:
	steps:
	- script: echo ${{ parameters.yesNo }}
	- stage: acceptance
	dependsOn: development
	pool:
	vmImage: windows-latest
	jobs:
	- deployment:
	environment: acceptance
	strategy:
	runOnce:
	deploy:
	steps:
	- script: echo ${{ parameters.yesNo }}

view raw extendibletemplate.yml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

To create a pipeline that extends a template, we need to provide the relative path to the template file and also pass all (required) parameter:

	resources:
	pipelines:
	- pipeline: example_ci # Name of the pipeline resource(up to you to choose)
	source: Example-CI # Name of the pipeline (case sensitive!)
	trigger: true
	pool:
	vmImage: ubuntu-latest
	extends:
	template: templates/template.yml
	parameters:
	yesNo: false

view raw example.yml hosted with ❤ by GitHub