Testing Azure DevOps Pipelines Locally
I have tried and tried before, plus also read a lot of other people asking for the ability to test Azure YAML Pipelines locally. Now although it is not perfect and some room for improvement, Microsoft has create a way to test your pipeline with some local testing and remote testing without having to check in your YAML.
The issue to solve is, you making a change to a Azure DevOps Pipelines YAML, then to test this you need to check it in just to find out something small like, the value you passed is not correct, or the linked repository isn’t spelt correctly. This can then get very annoying as you need to keep doing this back and forward until it is finally able to run.
A quick tool you can use, which is completely local, is the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension ‘ Azure Pipelines ‘. This will validate your YAMLs formatting and in the Output window to the left it can show you the hierarchy flow of the YAML, which is the first step to validate.
Another handy tool is ‘ Azure DevOps Snippets ‘, which is an auto-complete library of the Azure DevOps Tasks. This can help in getting the correct names of parameters and tasks, instead of having to need a solid memory.
However, these tools will only help with formatting the local YAML and without the parameters you have set in the Azure DevOps Library. What we need is to test this remotely against the information in Azure DevOps and for that Microsoft have provided an API.
This API can be used to run a pipeline remotely that is stored in Azure DevOps, so you can automate via the API to trigger builds. It also has two handy parameters. One being ‘previewRun’, a boolean to determine if this should run the pipeline for real or validate the run. This will use all the information you have set in Azure DevOps and the pipeline, but it will not create a new build and run code. What it will do is use the correct parameters, link to the other real repositories and check all the data will work. It is also the setting use when you edit the pipeline in Azure DevOps and select ‘Validate’ from the options menu in the top right.
This is really good, but would still require you to check in the YAML that you have edited, which is why there is the parameter ‘yamlOverride’ in the API. In this parameter you can add you newly edited YAML content and this will replace what is store in Azure DevOps without overwriting it.
Read more methods at the original post > http://prcode.co.uk/2021/02/17/testing-azure-devops-pipelines-locally/
