DevOps - Disabling stages in a release pipeline

Question

I have a Release pipeline with ~20 stages. Depending on the kind of release we are doing, we decide to run some subset of these stages.

Running each stage is expensive and we do not want to run it unless absolutely necessary.

Is there a direct way to disable some stages at the time of kicking off the release, so that we execute only the absolute necessary stages in the release?

If not, then what is the best programmatic way of achieving this behavior?

It sounds like you should have multiple release pipelines. – Daniel Mann Jan 09 '19 at 04:42 — Daniel Mann, Jan 09 '19 at 04:42

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 09 '19 at 07:03

Currently, there is no option to disable the stages based on the conditions. I'd suggest you can submit feedback for this feature

As Daniel Suggest you should create separate release pipelines for your use case

Another option is to you can define that conditions in the task level with your stages to skip.

For Example,

You have 3 stages:

DEV
QA
PROD

Each Stage have 2 task:

Task 1
Task 2

Let say if you don't want to deploy in QA.

Then you can define your custom condition for the 2 Tasks in QA in order to skip the execution.

You can refer my answer for working with custom conditions.

score 4 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 02 '22 at 00:18

4

It is very simple: Just use "condition" false or true; it will skip your stage; e.g.,

stages:
- stage: "CreateTemplates"  
  condition: "false"

click here for stage condition example

edited Dec 02 '22 at 00:18

Jeremy Caney

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answered Nov 29 '22 at 18:51

Jaswant Sharma

41
4

Wonderful! Not documented but working like a charm! I've just used False (without double quotes) as it is recognized as Boolean from MS. – Zioalex Feb 09 '23 at 15:10
Same here, I can confirm this works :) – Abdurrahman I. Mar 22 '23 at 08:43

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 28 '21 at 14:07

When starting the pipeline through the ADO webinterface, ADO now lets you specify which stages to run.

If you prefer to select the stages programmatically, then you can use conditions. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/conditions?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml

stages:
- stage: A

# stage B runs if A fails
- stage: B
  condition: failed()

# stage C runs if B succeeds
- stage: C
  dependsOn:
  - A
  - B
  condition: succeeded('B')

DevOps - Disabling stages in a release pipeline

3 Answers3