How to enable the classic build and release pipelines in Azure DevOps
Introduction
Before starting with the nitty gritty details, you might be wondering what are the “classic build and release pipelines” aka “the classic pipelines” in Azure DevOps. The “classic pipelines” is simply a term that refers to a UI assisted way of creating pipelines in Azure DevOps. The only purpose of this web forms based assistant is basically to hide the complexity of the pipeline’s YAML based syntax. In other words, the user can create pipelines without having to deal with “code”. As you can see in the image below, it is pretty much the “no-code” version of Azure DevOps.
This UI based tool can be a valid approach for the most common cases of DevOps in the industry, for beginners in Azure pipelines or simply for a quick test of the platform creating a demo that showcases basic features. But in the world of software development, the specific needs of the companies (in term of DevOps) usually are a super-set of the most common cases of DevOps in the industry with specific variations and peculiarities, therefore it is impossible to handle all the universe of possibilities in pipelines with a no-code tool.
The Azure team has decided to focus all the efforts towards the YAML based pipelines since the PaC (Pipeline as Code) approach is more versatile, adaptable, flexible and extensible than the “classic pipelines” approach.
Imagine for a second that you are part of the development team in charge of developing the Azure pipelines and you are in charge of adding a new feature. With the YAML based approach is just about adding the new feature in the YAML parser, update the documentation for the developers and announce the new release version of the Azure pipelines. With the “classic pipelines” approach, as a member of the Azure team , on top of doing the same as with the YAML based model, you would have to adapt the UI based tool to support the new feature. With the growing amount of features and different scenarios this can become a nightmare in a very short time period.
I personally totally understand the decision of the Azure DevOps team in stop supporting the “classic pipelines” in favor of the PaC approach. In any case the “classic pipelines” were just generating YAML code in the background on behalf of the user, so any “classic pipeline” is a YAML based pipeline that uses a subset of the features and possibilities that the YAML configuration code offers.
How to enable the classic build and release pipelines
If you are interested in bringing back “the classic pipelines” (no-code approach) to your Azure DevOps project, pay attention and follow the steps below.
Finally disable the options higlighted in the image below
Your settings must be like in the image above. Now when you come back to the create pipeline screen, you will see the option “Use the classic editor to create a pipeline without YAML”, same as in the image below
Summary
In this article you not only learnt step by step how to enable “the classic pipelines” in Azure DevOps, you also learnt what are “the classic pipelines”, and what are the differences with the PaC (Pipelines as Code). You also learnt on which cases the classic pipelines can be a good option for you and finally you understood why the Azure development team decided to stop developing this no-code tool.
I hope this article has helped you and I wish you lots of success creating your own Azure pipelines.
