Do you have repeating blocks in your VSTS release pipelines?
I certainly do. A common one is to run a set of functional test, so I need to repeatedly …
- Deploy some test files to a VM
- Deploy a test agent to the VM – IMPORTANT I had not realised you can only run one test run against this deployed agent. You need to redeploy it for the next run
- Run my tests
- … and repeat for next test type/configuration/test plan/DLL etc.
In the past this lead to a lot of repeat tasks in my release pipeline, all very messy.
Now in VSTS we have the option of Meta-tasks, these allow tasks to be grouped into in-effect functions with their own properties.
In the above screen shot below you can see I use a meta-task ‘Run Tests’ that wrappers the four tasks shown below.
Much neater, but as you might expect with something new I have come across a few minor gotchas
- You cannot order the list of properties for the meta-task
- This is a problem as the first one is used to generate the instance name in the pipeline. No a major problem you can always edit it.
- Meta-tasks properties are auto-detected from any variables used with in the meta-task tasks, the auto-detection mechanism is case sensitive, unless the rest of VSTS variable handling. So be careful to not end up with duplicates.
That all said, I think this is big step forward in readability and reuse for release management