Adding release management environment templates to your VSS extension
One of the easiest way to create a Release Definition is by using a pre-created environment template. If you have ever authored a release definition, you would have seen this pop-up while adding a new environment -
This lets you choose a template from system templates, or you can save your own environment as a template and re-use them while creating new environments. As an author of a vss extension you can now define environment templates which will be available to all users when they install the extension.
Steps to add an environment template to your extension
- The contribution that the extension needs to target to add environment templates is ms.vss-environmenttemplate.environment-template
- All the changes to describe this template go to vss-extension.json file of the extension.
- Define your template with the following properties (the payload looks like any other environment template) -
- Id - A guid to uniquely identify your environment template.
- Name - Name of the template that will show up in the popup shown above.
- Description - Describe what the template can do
- Variables - A set of RM variables that the environment will be set up with.
- DeployPhases - A list of the deploy phases that will be executed when the deployment begins. Each deploy phase will have its own set of tasks to be executed by the agent.
- Add an icon to represent the template.
- Build and install the extension! The template should be available in templates list now.
Link to the Release Management extensions repo on GitHub that has a sample extension published.
If you are new to writing extensions, this link will be useful.