Skip to main content

Azure Pipelines–Skip if global tool is already installed

In my yesterday post, I installed and used a dotnet global tool to generate an SBOM. If you were really paying attention, you maybe noticed that I did something special to install the tool. This is the topic of today's post.

In my original attempt to install the SBOM .NET tool, I used the following task:

And this is the task I used in the end:

Do you notice the difference?

The difference is in the Arguments section. I originally used the install argument and switched later to an update argument. Let me explain why…

When I executed the original pipeline for a second time, it no longer worked and I got the following error:

Starting: dotnet install SBOM tool

==============================================================================

Task : .NET Core

Description : Build, test, package, or publish a dotnet application, or run a custom dotnet command

Version : 2.174.0

Author : Microsoft Corporation

Help : https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/tasks/build/dotnet-core-cli

==============================================================================

C:\Windows\system32\chcp.com 65001

Active code page: 65001

Info: .NET Core SDK/runtime 2.2 and 3.0 are now End of Life(EOL) and have been removed from all hosted agents. If you're using these SDK/runtimes on hosted agents, kindly upgrade to newer versions which are not EOL, or else use UseDotNet task to install the required version.

"C:\Program Files\dotnet\dotnet.exe" tool install --global Microsoft.Sbom.DotNetTool

Tool 'microsoft.sbom.dotnettool' is already installed.

##[error]Error: The process 'C:\Program Files\dotnet\dotnet.exe' failed with exit code 1

Info: Azure Pipelines hosted agents have been updated to contain .Net Core 3.x (3.1) SDK/Runtime along with 2.1. Unless you have locked down a SDK version for your project(s), 3.x SDK might be picked up which might have breaking behavior as compared to previous versions.

Some commonly encountered changes are:

If you're using `Publish` command with -o or --Output argument, you will see that the output folder is now being created at root directory rather than Project File's directory. To learn about more such changes and troubleshoot, refer here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/tasks/build/dotnet-core-cli?view=azure-devops#troubleshooting

##[error]Dotnet command failed with non-zero exit code on the following projects :

Finishing: dotnet install SBOM tool

.NET doesn’t like it when you run the dotnet install --global command when a tool is already installed. I couldn’t find a good solution to skip the task if the global tool is already there. In the end I decided to use a workaround and switch to the update command which also works when the tool is not installed yet.

Remark: If you have a lot of pipelines running in parallel using this command, it could still result in an error as the global tool doesn’t like it when multiple update commands are being executed at the same time.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...
Read more