Templates in Azure Pipelines: What, Why, and How

[@CoderDave]

✨ *Question of the day* ✨What do you use or plan to use Azure Pipelines Templates for? *SUPPORT THE CHANNEL :* Buy me a coffee: www.buymeacoffee.com/CoderDave Join my Patreon: www.patreon.com/CoderDave PayPal me donation: paypal.me/dabenveg

[@Chatsworth1979]

Now I understand why YAML build files are so important, and why the "visually defined" build definitions I like so well on Azure Devops are not the preferred way. Nice vid, +1, thanks.

[@GoMissy]

It's super useful to learn yaml Azure Pipelines. Will follow the next classes for sure.

[@CoderDave]

Great to hear! I have more videos that go through the YAML Pipelines in geenral, hope you will enjoy them as well

[@schedarr]

That is exactly what I needed yesterday, great timing.

[@CoderDave]

Glad it helped ☺️

[@Renn_lab]

Your videos are the best! Always on point. Thank you

[@CoderDave]

Glad you think so!

[@sahasra8173]

How to define a template if it is used across repositories? Seems templates need to be stored in one specific repository. My intention is to achieve something similar to task group which is stored in server and can be used across pipelines...

[@AkshayKumar-re3bf]

Hi Dave, can you do another video on checkout to other repo, i saw your 3min video on this but i got errors after the checkout job(no files matching), can you do a brief video on how to do check out. that will be very much helpful.. Thanks dave for all your content

[@CoderDave]

Hey, not sure what error you got... but that video covers everything there is on how to checkout from another repo... after adding the repo as resource, as I explain in that video, all you have to do it checkout with the label you added to the resource... and that's it :)

[@pshah2952]

Hi Dave, Thanks great start-up for YAML templates. I like the way you explain the complex topic in simplified way. I was looking for all your videos on YAML and also on moving existing application from VM to docker containers, I subscribed to your channel but could not locate your videos specific to these subjects. Do you have or can create a playlist for both topics? I also have access to LinkedIn learning and PluralSight. If you can recommend something there or if you have something like that on Channel9, please let me know.

[@CoderDave]

Thanks! I don't have specific playlist of YAML pipelines, but I will see what I can do. I do have however 2 playlist, on for Pipelines Triggers and one for Pipelines Environments which you probably will find interesting.

[@JoshStaffordD]

Thanks, that was really helpful. A tip for you though, template is pronounced with a schwa sound not a long a. So it rhymes with flit, and doesn't sound like plate. Though perhaps in British english, that would be correct.

[@priyankaagarwal4126]

Was looking forward for the deep dive video .. can we assign values to parameters at runtime . ?

[@CoderDave]

Sorry, I still have that video in the backlog. About the parameters, absolutely. You can use variables to assign values to parameters

[@marcoparenzan]

Great video. One question. As a company use and reuse templates in many different projects, where do they typically collect templates? Do they use one specific project in a collection to store all templates? Or is there any other practice?

[@CoderDave]

Good question! and the answer is, as usual, it depends :) if the templates are relative only to a specific project, then they will live in that project (in the same or a different repo). But if the templates my be applied to multiple projects, then they can be stored in a separate Team Project available to the whole org.

[@drreaux]

Can you reference a template file from other repos? (Like a master template repo)

[@CoderDave]

You sure can. But the mechanism is a little different because you have to use resources instead. I had few people asking me this, I may make a video about it

[@danakm229]

HI Dave, excellent video series here! I have a use case where I have a project with several repositories, each repo with their own build pipelines that publish artifacts. I want a single release pipeline, that downloads artifacts from all of my other repositories, and on run-time I want to pick and choose which artifacts would I like to create a release for. Can you please share what would be a good approach to do this?

[@bharathinayak5802]

how can i download above yaml files ?

[@CoderDave]

Sorry, They are not in a public repo :) but it should be very easy to create your own templates :)

[@mr.hgorgan1812]

man this is way more complicated than it seems, it's giving me headaches aaarghhhh. But thanks for the video tho

[@CoderDave]

It's not the easiet thing to do, but when you master it, it can really help :)