How do I edit view and edit the YAML file for the Release Pipeline in Azure Dev Ops?

Question

I've successfully built my code on Azure Dev Ops by modifying the pipeline YAML file, but I have been unable to successfully deploy the artifact to my IIS Server. The only way to create a deployment is by using its unpleasant UI.

I've read that by turning on a multi-pipelines preview feature, you can view and edit the YAML file. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. You can edit the build scripts, but not the release ones. I tried to add deployment tasks in the main pipeline YAML file, but it neither executes or shows up in the releases section.

Answer 1

The "Release" section in Azure DevOps is still only in the UI, you can't use it in YAML.

But when you enable the multi-stage pipelines you can use the "build" YAML pipelines also to deploy your app (you can see that no "Builds" tab anymore, there is "Pipelines").

The downside is that you don't have all the features that exist in the release, like approvals, gates, etc. but you can see in the roadmap that Microsoft work on it and the features will be available also in the YAML.

You can check this article on how to use the multi-stage YAML for build & deployment.

Another good tutorial from Microsoft available here.