What is Azure Pipelines?

Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server | Azure DevOps Server 2022

Azure Pipelines is the part of Azure DevOps that combines continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous delivery to automatically build, test, and deploy code projects to any destination. Azure Pipelines supports all major languages and project types, and can automate workflows in your chosen technologies and frameworks whether your app is on-premises or in the cloud.

Azure Pipelines benefits

Azure Pipelines provides a quick, easy, and safe way to automate building your projects with consistent, high-quality, readily available code.

Azure Pipelines offers the following benefits:

• Deploys to different types of targets simultaneously
• Integrates with Azure deployments
• Integrates with GitHub
• Works with any language or platform
• Works on Windows, Linux, or Mac machines
• Works with open-source projects

Prerequisites

To use Azure Pipelines, you must:

• Have an Azure DevOps organization. If you don't have one, create an organization.
• Store your source code in a version control system.

Languages and applications

Azure Pipelines tasks can build, test, and deploy applications written in Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C#, C++, Go, XCode, .NET, Android, and iOS. You can run these apps in parallel on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Azure Pipelines offers test tasks in many different testing frameworks and services. You can use command line, PowerShell, or Bash shell scripts to run your automation.

Continuous integration

Development teams use CI to automate merging and testing code. The CI process helps to catch bugs early in the development cycle so they're easier to fix.

To help preserve quality, Azure Pipelines runs automated tests as part of the CI process. Azure Pipelines CI systems produce artifacts and feed them to release processes to drive continuous deployments.

Version control systems

Azure Pipelines requires source code to be in a version control system. You can set up Azure Pipelines to automatically build and validate changes you push to your version control repository.

Azure Pipelines supports several forms of version control, including GitHub and Azure Repos. For more information, see Supported source repositories.

Continuous testing

Azure Pipelines continuous testing lets you:

• Use any test type and test framework in your preferred test technologies.
• Test your changes in a fast, scalable, and efficient manner.
• Find problems earlier during development. Running tests automatically with each build ensures that your app still works after every checkin.
• View rich analytics and reporting. Review detailed, customizable test results to resolve issues and monitor the quality of your app. Track the health of your builds with actionable build-on-build reports.

For more information, see Run tests in parallel for any test runner.

Continuous delivery

Continuous delivery (CD) is the process of building, testing, and deploying code to one or more test or production environments. Deploying and testing in multiple environments optimizes quality.

Azure Pipelines CD produces deployable artifacts, including infrastructure and apps. Automated release processes consume these artifacts to release new versions or fixes to existing systems. Systems that continually monitor and send alerts allow visibility into the CD process.

Deployment targets

You can use Azure Pipelines to deploy your code to multiple targets. Targets include virtual machines, environments, containers, on-premises and cloud platforms, and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services. You can also publish your mobile application to a store.

Once you have CI running, you can create release definitions to automate deploying your application to one or more environments as a collection of tasks.

Package formats

To produce packages that external users can consume, you can integrate package management into your CI/CD pipelines. You can publish NuGet, npm, Maven, or Python package artifacts to the built-in Azure Pipelines package management repository, or to any other package management repository you choose. For more information about Azure Artifacts, see Artifacts in Azure Pipelines.

Azure Pipelines pricing

Use AI to manage pipelines

If you configure the Azure DevOps MCP Server, you can explore and manage your pipelines using natural language.

Related content

• Sign up for Azure Pipelines
• Create your first pipeline
• Customize your pipeline