Adding a second stage to the release pipeline

Following up from the previous post where we created a CI/CD pipeline directly from Visual Studio 2019, I will now show you how to add another stage to the pipeline. This new production stage will be added as the last stage and will only be triggered after someone approves it by pushing THE button.

Let’s go to our Azure DevOps release pipeline again. Hover over the previously auto-generated stage, and a plus button will be shown. Hovering over that one as well will reveal that this is in fact the Add button.

However, what I want in this case is for the production stage to repeat what is in the dev stage with the only difference being the Web App where the artifact will be deployed. So what I will do is to clone the dev stage and then modify it. That’s what the Clone button is for. Go on, click it to create a copy of the dev stage.

We can now modify the production stage. We just need to change the name of the stage as well as the App Service name in the deploy task:

However, in order to be able to choose the required web app, we first need to authorise it. The process that automatically generated the pipeline had also created a service principal on the web app itself, so we just need to copy this to the other web app from access control as shown below:

The production deployment stage is now in place, but since it was cloned from the previous stage, it will be triggered automatically after each build. We will change it so that it will only deploy to production after it is approved. The lightning icon takes you to the trigger configuration.

It’s just a matter of switching pre-deployment approvals to on and selecting the people who can approve. I will leave the approval policy settings alone for my personal website, but they may come in handy when pushing code to production and other people are involved.

So there it is, a two-stage pipeline where the Dev stage is automatically triggered on each build, and optionally pushed to Prod after approval.