Azure Pipelines: CI/CD

Azure Pipelines is the CI/CD engine within Azure DevOps. It automates the process of building, testing, and deploying your applications to any platform, cloud, or on-premises environment. With YAML-based pipeline definitions, your CI/CD configuration lives alongside your code, making it version-controlled, reviewable, and repeatable.

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Continuous Integration (CI)

CI is the practice of automatically building and testing code every time a developer pushes changes. The goal is to catch issues early and maintain a deployable codebase.

What CI Does

1. Trigger — a developer pushes code or opens a pull request
2. Build — the pipeline compiles the code and resolves dependencies
3. Test — automated tests run (unit, integration, linting)
4. Publish — build artifacts are stored for deployment

Basic CI Pipeline

# azure-pipelines.yml
trigger:
  branches:
    include:
      - main
      - feature/*

pool:
  vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

steps:
  - task: NodeTool@0
    inputs:
      versionSpec: '20.x'
    displayName: 'Install Node.js'

  - script: npm ci
    displayName: 'Install dependencies'

  - script: npm run lint
    displayName: 'Run linter'

  - script: npm test -- --coverage
    displayName: 'Run tests'

  - task: PublishTestResults@2
    inputs:
      testResultsFormat: 'JUnit'
      testResultsFiles: '**/junit.xml'
    displayName: 'Publish test results'