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sqlversion-controlazure-devopsdevelopment-environment

Is it possible to copy a Azure DevOps build and run it locally?

I originally felt this question was for Software Engineering, but they've closed it as off topic and sent me here, so here I am.

One of the biggest time sinks when doing the odd piece of DB development is setting up the environment locally, often my process goes like so:

  • Get database
    • Publish db server
    • Publish db
    • Load test data
    • Repeat for any dependencies (can go 3-4 levels deep)

This is a bit of a pain really, and can take a while, and I was thinking if there are any ways to automate this.

We make use of ADO, and through ADO we run builds that deploy our changes and load out test data to make sure we haven't broke anything. Now I imagine ADO follows a very similar process to myself like above, and reviewing the build it looks something like so:

enter image description here

Now, I'd love it if I could get access to the script that runs this, so that when I start development, it gets rid of all the above down-time of setting up the environment.

Does anyone know a way to do this? Or perhaps have any other recommendations?

Solution

  • No, it's unable to copy the build to run locally. They are all based on the existing tasks (see Build and release tasks and azure-pipelines-tasks ).

    However, you can try to develop your own scripts by calling the corresponding tools for each step, then combine them together.

    Alternately you could setup a private agent on your develop machine, then you can build with this private agent with that build definition.

    Another way is setup a on-premise Azure DevOps server, thus you can export the definition from your Azure DevOps Service and import to the on-premise Azure DevOps server to use the definition directly.