Azure YAML Pipelines

Azure YAML Pipelines is an extension that helps you navigate large Azure Pipelines repositories.

Features

• Links
• Find References
• Outline View
  • Easy Navigation
  • Open Template
• Other features
  • List Dependencies
  • Render
• Pipelines View

Links

The extension decorates all y*ml and azure-pipelines files with links for all referenced templates, so you can easily navigate to them using Ctrl/Cmd + click

Find References

This extension introduces some new entries in the context menu of Explorer View and document tab headers. The "Find Template References" action will find all the file's usage in the repo, using the standard References view of VsCode.

The same feature is implemented for parameters.

Outline

The Outline view shows a tree of all the stages / jobs / steps in a template, so you can have a quick overview of what the template does.

Easy Navigation

Clicking on the view's tree nodes takes you to the location in the YAML document.

You can collapse the tree to see only the stages and jobs of a pipeline, hiding the parameters and steps. This is especially useful for large pipeline files.

Open Template

For other templates, the view provides a button that opens the referenced file. By default, the view follows the active file and it refreshes its structure as you navigate between templates. However, you can pin the view to the current yaml, so you can focus on it.

For parameters it provides a convenient "Find References" button. Doing this will display all the other templates that use that particular parameter and, along with it, warnings related to parameter misspellings or extra parameters passed to the template.

Other Features

List Dependencies

Inspects the YAML and lists all referenced templates, including the ones defined in remote repositories (note: requires configuring a mapping). Useful when troubleshooting the 100 templates limit.

Defininng the @tag -> path mapping will provide drill-down abilities in all features of the extension.

Render

Calls the Azure Devops Preview API to generate the full YAML, rendering all chidren templates. Useful for debugging the final YAML, as generated by ADO.

Pipelines View

Displays all pipelines of an ADO project (requires an ADO PAT).

On demand, you can fetch a list of recent builds per pipeline. You can monitor long-running builds and you will receive a notification when they finish.