Is there a tool to validate an Azure DevOps Pipeline locally?

azure-devops azure-pipelines static-analysis
Tomas Aschan picture Tomas Aschan · Oct 29, 2018 · Viewed 12.6k times · Source

When making changes to YAML-defined Azure DevOps Pipelines, it can be quite tedious to push changes to a branch just to see the build fail with a parsing error (valid YAML, but invalid pipeline definition) and then try to trial-and-error fix the problem.

It would be nice if the feedback loop could be made shorter, by analyzing and validating the pipeline definition locally; basically a linter with knowledge about the various resources etc that can be defined in an Azure pipline. However, I haven't been able to find any tool that does this.

Is there such a tool somewhere?

Answer

Jamie picture Jamie · Oct 29, 2018

You can run the Azure DevOps agent locally with its YAML testing feature.

Use Visual Studio Team Services Agent to install an agent on your local machine and use the agent local YAML testing feature that is available within the agent.

This should get you very close to the type of feedback you would expect.

Hope this helps.

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