Azure DevOps Publish and Download Artifacts

 This post is to talk about one minor thing, but that took me a couple hours to fix. It’s about using the tasks to publish and download artifacts.

I read several blog posts and the Microsoft documentation and all examples are pointing out that I can use the system location $(Build.ArtifactStagingLocation) when doing the publishing during my build phase.

So that’s what I did as you can see in the code below:

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- task: PublishBuildArtifacts@1   displayName: 'Publish Package'   inputs:     PathtoPublish: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)'     ArtifactName: 'DebugReport-Function'

And according to these blog posts and documentation I can use the same location to retrieve the artifact during my deployment phase.

So I did the following code to do so:

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steps: - task: AzureFunctionApp@1   displayName: 'Deploy Azure Function'   inputs:     azureSubscription: 'mycredential'     appType: 'functionApp'     appName: 'myApp'     package: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)/**/*.zip'     deploymentMethod: 'auto'

But this does not work. It keeps saying that it cannot find the file, but checking the logs I could see it was being generated properly.

Below you can see the error message I was getting:

I added a few debug steps to check the location of know system variables to understand what was going on using a powershell script as below:

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- task: PowerShell@2   displayName: 'Degug parameters'   inputs:     targetType: Inline     script: |       Write-Host "$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)"       Write-Host "$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)"       Write-Host "$(System.ArtifactsDirectory)"       Write-Host "$(Pipeline.Workspace)"       Write-Host "$(System.ArtifactsDirectory)"

With that I could see that the location it was looking was not the same as the location where the package was being published.

The $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory) was returning d:\a\1\a but the file was being downloaded to d:\a\1.

With the debugging script above, I could see that this location is the one present at $(Pipeline.Workspace), which was happening automatically.

The Microsoft documentation is very confusing but finally I found one that helped me in pointing to the solution at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/artifacts/pipeline-artifacts?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml-task#artifact-selection.

In there is explaining that I can define where I can download the artifacts to with the following task:

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steps: - download: none - task: DownloadPipelineArtifact@2   displayName: 'Download Build Artifacts'   inputs:     patterns: '**/*.zip'     path: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)'

Now I can define exactly where I want to download the artifacts to. Please be aware that the download happens automatically to $(Pipeline.Workspace), so if you don’t want you deployment to download the files twice, you need to specify the “download: none” in your steps.

Summary

I don’t know if this was a recent change or not, but all blog posts pointing to the same system variable with no mention to this finding that I got seems very strange to me. It would be really good to know if someone out there is having the same problem as me.