In our Azure DevOps Server we have several build pipelines with various triggers. I wanted to introduce batch building as our team has grown. I have a "development" pipeline I use for testing pipeline changes before rolling them out to the team. When I added the batch parameter to the pipeline and tested it, the other pipelines ran as well! This is not what I want. Has anyone seen this behavior before?

So, my question is: Why does adding the batch parameter to one pipeline seem to affect other pipelines?

Here are the important details:

Azure DevOps Server (premise) 2022.2

My "test" pipeline:

trigger:
  batch: true
  branches:
    include:
    - Task-8624-batch-pipeline-builds
    exclude:
    - main

My regular pipeline:

trigger:
- main

Steps I did:

1. In git, create the Task-8624-batch-pipeline-builds branch
2. Edit the azure-pipelines.yml file on the branch
3. Push the branch to git
4. Edit the "Get sources" for my "test" pipeline to use that branch
5. Make a test commit on that branch and push it
6. Note that my other pipeline started building as well!!!!

This has caused me to abandon what I hoped to be a simple improvement for our team. Any insight is appreciated.

Thanks, Michael

In our Azure DevOps Server we have several build pipelines with various triggers. I wanted to introduce batch building as our team has grown. I have a "development" pipeline I use for testing pipeline changes before rolling them out to the team. When I added the batch parameter to the pipeline and tested it, the other pipelines ran as well! This is not what I want. Has anyone seen this behavior before?

So, my question is: Why does adding the batch parameter to one pipeline seem to affect other pipelines?

Here are the important details:

Azure DevOps Server (premise) 2022.2

My "test" pipeline:

trigger:
  batch: true
  branches:
    include:
    - Task-8624-batch-pipeline-builds
    exclude:
    - main

My regular pipeline:

trigger:
- main

Steps I did:

1. In git, create the Task-8624-batch-pipeline-builds branch
2. Edit the azure-pipelines.yml file on the branch
3. Push the branch to git
4. Edit the "Get sources" for my "test" pipeline to use that branch
5. Make a test commit on that branch and push it
6. Note that my other pipeline started building as well!!!!

This has caused me to abandon what I hoped to be a simple improvement for our team. Any insight is appreciated.

Thanks, Michael

• azure-devops
• azure-pipelines
• cicd
• azure-pipelines-yaml

1 Answer 1

I could reproduce the same issue when the Yaml files have the same name in each branch.

For example:

--MyRepository
 |
 --main branch
   -- azure-pipelines.yml
 |
 --Task-8624-batch-pipeline-builds branch
   -- azure-pipelines.yml

When you commit the change to Task-8624-batch-pipeline-builds, it will trigger other pipelines.

For example:

To solve this issue, you could change each Yaml file name in branches and make sure that they are unique.

For example:

--MyRepository
 |
 --main branch
   -- azure-pipelines-main.yml
 |
 --Task-8624-batch-pipeline-builds branch
   -- azure-pipelines-test.yml

Then you need to modify the related pipelines to use the correct YAML files. In this case, when you commit to Task-8624-batch-pipeline-builds branch, it will not trigger other pipelines.

Result: