Continue build after script fails in Azure DevOps

Question

In my Azure DevOps build task I run a Cypress test. If the test fails the build is canceled. But I want to run another task after Cypress the publishes the test results.

I've tried it with this task in my pipeline.yml file:

- task: PowerShell@2
  inputs:
    targetType: "inline"
    script: "yarn test:cypress"
    errorActionPreference: "continue"
  displayName: "start server and run cypress"

But this doesn't seem to have any effect.

I've tried add -ErrorAction 'Continue' to to script"

"start": "npm-run-all -s build:shared-web run:shell",
"cy:run": "cypress run -ErrorAction 'Continue'",
"test:cypress": "start-server-and-test start http://localhost:3000 cy:run"

But this fails with:

error: unknown option: -E

It looks like Cypress is seeing the ErrorAction as a Cypress parameter.

So what's the correct way of continuing a build if a task fails?

Answer 1

You can add to the task this:

continueOnError: true

Now the build will keep running even the tests will fail.

If you want to fail the build if the tests failed but you want to run only one task to publish the results, you can add this to the publish tests task:

condition: always()

Now the publish task will be running always, even the tests are failed and the build canceled/failed.