📍 Introduction:

Azure Pipelines is a powerful tool for automating builds, tests, and deployments in your projects. In this blog post, we will explore the concept of continuous integration (CI), learn how to create a build pipeline, configure build triggers and manage build artifacts. By the end of this post, you will have a solid understanding of CI and be able to implement it in your projects using Azure Pipelines.

🔍 Understanding Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice that involves automatically building and testing code changes as they are committed to a repository. This helps to catch integration issues early, reduce the risk of bugs, and improve the overall quality of the software. CI typically involves the following steps:

• Developers commit code changes to a shared repository.

• A build system automatically compiles the code and runs tests.

• If the build or tests fail, the team is notified, and the issue is fixed.

• If the build and tests pass, the changes can be merged into the main branch.

🔍 Creating a Build Pipeline

To create a build pipeline in Azure Pipelines, follow these steps:

Step 1: Sign in to your Azure DevOps account and navigate to your project.

Step 2: Click on "Pipelines" in the left-hand menu.

Step 3: Click on the "New pipeline" button.

Step 4: Select the source repository for your code. This can be an Azure Repos Git repository, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or another Git repository.

Step 5: Choose a template for your pipeline. This will provide a starting point for your pipeline configuration. For example, you can choose a template for building a .NET Core application, a Node.js application, or a Python package.

Step 6: Customize the pipeline configuration as needed. This may involve adding or modifying build tasks, specifying build variables, or configuring build agents.

Step 7: Click "Save and run" to create and run your build pipeline.

🔍 Configuring Build Triggers and Managing to Build Artifacts

Build triggers determine when a build pipeline should run. By default, a build pipeline will run whenever changes are committed to the repository. However, you can also configure other types of triggers, such as scheduled triggers or pull request triggers.

🔍 To configure build triggers, follow these steps:

Step 1: In your build pipeline configuration, click on the "Triggers" tab.

Step 2: Enable or disable the "Continuous integration" trigger as needed. This trigger will run the pipeline whenever changes are committed to the repository.

Step 3: To configure a scheduled trigger, click on the "Add" button under "Scheduled triggers" and specify the desired schedule.

Step 4: To configure a pull request trigger, click on the "Add" button under "Pull request triggers" and specify the desired settings.

Build artifacts are the output of a build pipeline, such as compiled code, test results, or packaged applications. To manage to build artifacts, follow these steps:

Step 1: In your build pipeline configuration, add a "Publish Build Artifacts" task. This task will publish the specified artifacts to Azure Pipelines.

Step 2: Configure the "Publish Build Artifacts" task by specifying the path to the artifacts, the artifact name, and the artifact publishing location.

Step 3: Save and run your build pipeline. The published artifacts will be available in the "Artifacts" tab of the build summary page.

📍 Conclusion:

In this blog post, we have explored the concept of continuous integration, learned how to create a build pipeline in Azure Pipelines, and configured build triggers and managed build artifacts. By implementing CI in your projects using Azure Pipelines, you can improve the quality of your software, catch integration issues early, and streamline your development process.

🔍 Checkout GitHub Repository for projects:

🔗 github.com/sumanprasad007