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Azure DevOps–Skip CI build when pushing code

I assume today that almost everyone is using the concept of a  continuous integration(CI) build. This means that every time a new commit pushed to the master branch(or feature branch) on the remote origin the build pipeline is triggered. This allows to validate if the code changes will compile, the tests succeed, etc…

To configure a CI build in Azure DevOps, you only need to specify the applicable branches in your YAML build pipeline:

However there are exceptional cases where you want don’t want that a new build is triggered. In Azure DevOps this can be done by adding any of the following comments in the message or description in any of the commits that are part of a push:

  • [skip ci] or [ci skip]
  • skip-checks: true or skip-checks:true
  • [skip azurepipelines] or [azurepipelines skip]
  • [skip azpipelines] or [azpipelines skip]
  • [skip azp] or [azp skip]
  • ***NO_CI***

This can be useful if you want to reduce the number of consumed build minutes when using the Microsoft-hosted agents on Azure.

Remark: If you have a lot of small commits pushed often, you can also reduce the cost by batching CI runs. This can be done by setting batch to true in your YAML. When a pipeline is running, the system waits until the run is completed, then starts another run with all changes that have not yet been built.

More information: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/repos/azure-repos-gity

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