Azure Pipeline YAML Templates and Parameters

I’m currently building a project that uses Azure Pipelines, specifically the YAML Pipeline so that I can have it in source control.

But the Pipeline has a number of tasks that I have to execute multiple times with different parameters, so I grouped them into a job and just copy/pasted them the 3 times I needed. This was a quick way to get it tested and working, but as I modified the Pipeline I’d have to do the modification multiple times, which was a bit annoying (a few times I forgot to replicate the change and broke the build!).

Enter Templates

In the past I’ve used Task Groups in the visual Pipeline builder to extract a common set of tasks to run multiple times. With YAML we have Templates which work by allowing you to extract a job out into a separate file that you can reference.

Fantastic, it works just as I want it to, the only thing left is to pass in the various parameters. That’s easy to do from the main Pipeline:

jobs:
- template: templates/npm-with-params.yml # Template reference
  parameters:
    name: Linux
    vmImage: 'ubuntu-16.04'

And then I hit a problem…

Working with output variables

Not all the variables I need to pass in are static values, some are the result of other tasks (in this case ARM deployments), which means that I am setting some multi-job output variables.

Prior to the refactor I was accessing the output variable with $[dependencies.JobName.outputs['taskName.VariableName']] and it was all good, now I need to pass it in, so we’ll update our template call:

jobs:
# omitted parent jobs
- template: templates/some-template.yml # Template reference
  parameters:
    STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME: $[dependencies.JobName.outputs['taskName.StorageAccountName']]
    name: SomeName
    azureSubscription: '...'

Then in the template I would use it like so:

parameters:
  STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME: ''
  name: ''

jobs:
- job: ${{ parameters.name }}
  pool: 
    vmImage: 'Ubuntu-16.04'
  steps:
  - task: AzureCLI@1
    inputs:
      azureSubscription: ${{ parameters.azureSubscription }}
      scriptLocation: inlineScript
      arguments: ${{ parameters.STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME }}
      inlineScript: |
        account_name=$1
        key=$(az storage account keys list --account-name $account_name | jq '.[0].value')
        # more script here

I run this and get an error:

az storage account keys list: error: Storage account ‘$[dependencies.JobName.outputs[‘taskName.StorageAccountName’]]’ not found.

Umm… what? Yes, you’re right Azure, that isn’t the name of the storage account, it’s the dynamic variable you should’ve evaluated! Why didn’t you evaluate?!

Evaluation of parameters in templates

So here’s the problem, the parameter I’m passing to my template isn’t being evaluated, which means that it’s being passed in a raw manner to the script when I want to use it. But never fear there’s an easy fix, you just need to assign the parameter to a variable :

parameters:
  STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME: ''
  name: ''

jobs:
- job: ${{ parameters.name }}
  pool: 
    vmImage: 'Ubuntu-16.04'
  variables:
    STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME: ${{ parameters.STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME }}

  steps:
  - task: AzureCLI@1
    inputs:
      azureSubscription: ${{ parameters.azureSubscription }}
      scriptLocation: inlineScript
      arguments: $(STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME)
      inlineScript: |
        account_name=$1
        key=$(az storage account keys list --account-name $account_name | jq '.[0].value')
        # more script here

Now you refer to the variable not the parameter in your tasks.

Conclusion

Honestly, I racked my brain on this for the better part of a day, and it really isn’t obvious that this is the case. I only stumbled on it by accident after trying a lot of other things.

Hopefully this helps someone else out when they are trying to work out why their template parameters aren’t evaluated!