Environment variables in Azure Pipelines
When you have a program that fetches values from the environment variables you have to handle this in a certain way in Azure pipelines. Initially, I though adding a variable to the variables section of the azure pipeline was enough like this:
variables:
- name: InputEnvironmentVariable
value: 'value'
But, what happends when you do this? I had to check, so created a powershell task that printed all environment variables available. (Fyi, this is a great debugging method if you are trying to debug variables)
- task: PowerShell@2
displayName: Output env variables
inputs:
targetType: inline
script: (gci env:* | sort-object name)
The output looked like this:
Name Value
---- -----
agent.jobstatus Succeeded
AGENT_BUILDDIRECTORY c:\vstsBuildAgent\Agent\_work\1
AGENT_DISABLELOGPLUGIN_TEST... true
AGENT_DISABLELOGPLUGIN_TEST... true
[...]
Unfortunetly, I was not able to find InputEnvironmentVariable in the output.
After visiting the task I found that you are able to add environment variable to tasks by using the env property on the task.
- task: PowerShell@2
displayName: Output env variables with one extra
env:
InputEnvironmentVariable: $
inputs:
targetType: inline
script: (gci env:* | sort-object name)
The result contained the environment variable!
Name Value
---- -----
agent.jobstatus Succeeded
AGENT_BUILDDIRECTORY c:\vstsBuildAgent\Agent\_work\1
AGENT_DISABLELOGPLUGIN_TEST... true
AGENT_DISABLELOGPLUGIN_TEST... true
[...]
InputEnvironmentVariable value
Therefore, if you have a exe or a task that is dependant that environment variables exists. Use the env property!