Pass values between template jobs in azure pipelines yaml

Question

I have the following setup where the first templated job (deploy-infra.yml) runs some terraform jobs which produce some output which are needed in later templated jobs, what I can seem to do is pass this output to other templated jobs, this seems to be because template parameters are determined at compile time not runtime.

Is there a way to do this? This is what I have currently:

- stage: Deploy_Canary
  displayName: Deploy Canary

  jobs:

  - template: deploy-infra.yml

  - template: deploy-software.yml
    parameters:
      dbserver: $[dependencies.DeployInfra.outputs['outputDeployInfra.dbserver']]

deploy-infra.yml produces this as an output which is taken from a powershell script which in turn takes output from a terraform module:

- pwsh: |
    echo "##vso[task.setvariable variable=dbserver]$(db.server)"
  name: outputDeployInfra

If I echo out parameters.dbserver in the deploy-software.yml job I just get:

$[dependencies.DeployInfra.outputs['outputDeployInfra.dbserver']]

Any ideas?! Thanks!

Answer 1

Pass values between template jobs in azure pipelines yaml

We need move the parameters from azure-pipelines.yaml, then parse it in the deploy-software.yml with variables:

  variables:
    Parametersdbserver: $[dependencies.DeployInfra.outputs['outputDeployInfra.dbserver']]

As test, I create deploy-infra.yml, deploy-software.yml and azure-pipelines.yaml:

deploy-infra.yml (Since I do not have the value of db.server, I defined it by variable with test value 123456.):

jobs:
- job: DeployInfra
  variables:
    db.server: 123456

  steps:
  - checkout: none
  - pwsh: |
      echo "##vso[task.setvariable variable=dbserver;isOutput=true]$(db.server)"     
    name: outputDeployInfra

deploy-software.yml:

jobs:
- job: deploysoftware
  dependsOn: DeployInfra
  variables:
    Parametersdbserver: $[dependencies.DeployInfra.outputs['outputDeployInfra.dbserver']]

  steps:
  - checkout: none
  - pwsh: |
      Write-Host "$(Parametersdbserver)"

azure-pipelines.yaml:

pool:
  vmImage: 'windows-latest'

stages:
  - stage: Deploy_Canary
    jobs:
    - template: deploy-infra.yml

    - template: deploy-software.yml

As the test result:

Hope this helps.