Configure schedules for pipelines

Azure DevOps Server 2019

Azure Pipelines provides several types of triggers to configure how your pipeline starts.

• Scheduled triggers start your pipeline based on a schedule, such as a nightly build. This article provides guidance on using scheduled triggers to run your pipelines based on a schedule.
• Event-based triggers start your pipeline in response to events, such as creating a pull request or pushing to a branch. For information on using event-based triggers, see Triggers in Azure Pipelines.

You can combine scheduled and event-based triggers in your pipelines, for example to validate the build every time a push is made (CI trigger), when a pull request is made (PR trigger), and a nightly build (Scheduled trigger). If you want to build your pipeline only on a schedule, and not in response to event-based triggers, ensure that your pipeline doesn't have any other triggers enabled. For example, YAML pipelines in a GitHub repository have CI triggers and PR triggers enabled by default. For information on disabling default triggers, see Triggers in Azure Pipelines and navigate to the section that covers your repository type.

Scheduled triggers

YAML

Scheduled builds aren't supported in YAML syntax in Azure DevOps Server 2019. After you create your YAML build pipeline, you can use pipeline settings to specify a scheduled trigger.

Classic

Select the days and times when you want to run the build using the classic editor.

If your repository is Azure Repos Git, GitHub, or Other Git, then you can also specify branches to include and exclude. If you want to use wildcard characters, then type the branch specification (for example, features/modules/*) and then press Enter.

Examples

YAML

Scheduled builds aren't supported in YAML syntax in Azure DevOps Server 2019. After you create your YAML build pipeline, you can use pipeline settings to specify a scheduled trigger.

Classic

Example: Nightly build of Git repo in multiple time zones

In this example, the classic editor scheduled trigger has two entries, which produce the following builds.

• Every Monday - Friday at 3:00 AM (UTC + 5:30 time zone), build branches that meet the features/india/* branch filter criteria

  

• Every Monday - Friday at 3:00 AM (UTC - 5:00 time zone), build branches that meet the features/nc/* branch filter criteria

  

Example: Nightly build with different frequencies

Azure Pipelines and Azure DevOps 2019 Server

In this example, the classic editor scheduled trigger has two entries, producing the following builds.

• Every Monday - Friday at 3:00 AM UTC, build branches that meet the main and releases/* branch filter criteria

  

• Every Sunday at 3:00 AM UTC, build the releases/lastversion branch, even if the source or pipeline hasn't changed

  

Cron syntax

YAML

Scheduled builds aren't supported in YAML syntax in Azure DevOps Server 2019. After you create your YAML build pipeline, you can use pipeline settings to specify a scheduled trigger.

Classic

Classic schedules are defined using a graphical editor instead of cron syntax. For information on defining classic schedules, see Examples.

Scheduled runs view

YAML

Scheduled builds aren't supported in YAML syntax in Azure DevOps Server 2019. After you create your YAML build pipeline, you can use pipeline settings to specify a scheduled trigger.

Classic

Classic scheduled pipelines don't have a Scheduled runs view, but you can view the schedule for a pipeline in the classic schedule editor for your pipeline.

Running even when there are no code changes

By default, your pipeline doesn't run as scheduled if there have been no code changes since the last successful scheduled run. For instance, consider that you've scheduled a pipeline to run every night at 9:00pm. During the weekdays, you push various changes to your code. The pipeline runs as per schedule. During the weekends, you don't make any changes to your code. If there have been no code changes since the scheduled run on Friday, then the pipeline doesn't run as scheduled during the weekend.

YAML

Scheduled builds aren't supported in YAML syntax in this version of Azure DevOps Server. After you create your YAML build pipeline, you can use pipeline settings to specify a scheduled trigger.

Classic

To configure the scheduled pipeline to build only if there has been a change since the last build, check Only schedule builds if the source or pipeline has changed.

Limits on the number of scheduled runs in YAML pipelines

There are certain limits on how often you can schedule a pipeline to run. These limits have been put in place to prevent misuse of Azure Pipelines resources, particularly the Microsoft-hosted agents. The limits are:

• around 1000 runs per pipeline per week
• 10 runs per pipeline per 15 minutes