Make your Build pipeline run faster — Pipeline Artifacts (Part 2)

In my previous post, I mentioned about using Pipeline Cache which increases the speed of your YAML Multistage Pipeline. Pipeline Cache reduces the need to restore dependencies if they do not change often.

But, wouldn't it be great if we just skip the build step altogether?

Most often or not, we do not need to build the code every time when deploying to different environments. Also, we should have some control over what versions should be deployed to specific environments.

In the example shown in the previous blog, all the stages (Build, Deploy to Dev, Deploy To Test) would run if we trigger the pipeline. We do not have to run the build stage again and again, because the same code would be deployed in all environments, the code does not change but the configuration parameters for each environment change.

Here, is where Pipeline Artifacts comes into play

Pipeline Artifacts uses a task to store the published builds in the Artifacts Section.

The task looks like this:

- task: UniversalPackages@0
inputs:
 command: ‘publish’
 publishDirectory: ‘$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)’