Getting Started

Azure Pipelines is part of Azure Devops. It lets you implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

During this workshop, you will learn how to create a pipeline to build a Maven / Java application and a NodeJs application. You will also discover Azure Pipelines features, such as pipeline caching, variables, parameters and templating.

At each steps of this workshop, you can found the solution in a Git branch.

Git branch

Here's the Git branch!

Anatomy of a pipeline

A pipeline is composed of stages, each stage is run sequentially. In this diagram, Stage 2 will be executed right after Stage 1. A stage is composed of jobs. For example, Stage 1 has 2 jobs : Job A and B. A job is executed on an agent. An agent is a machine, it can be compared to a Jenkins slave. With Azure, an agent can be a Microsoft-hosted or self-hosted agent. We will talk more about agents later. Inside a stage, each job can be executed simultaneously or sequentially. Finally, a job is composed of steps. A step can be a Microsoft task or script and each step is run sequentially.

If you want to go deeper with those concepts, you can browse the official documentation of pipeline concepts and agent.

Pricing & Pool Agent

Azure Pipelines is free to use on a public project. . On a private project, you can run up to 1,800 minutes (30 hours) of pipeline jobs for free every month.

You can have a look at all the available types of agent here. Each of them come with a set of installed softwares. During this workshop, we are going to use ubuntu-latest.

Setup

First of all, you have to fork this repository to your Github account

https://github.com/vgallet/workshop-pipeline

Then, in order to start with Azure Pipelines you need to create a Microsoft account if you haven’t one.

Once you are logged in, you have to create a project

Next, you have to select your repository in Github

And finally select “starter pipeline”. It will automatically create a starter pipeline file inside your repository.