Azure Pipeline Debugging Snippets

These are pipeline YAML snippets that I have found very handy.

Print all Environmental Variables

This is essential for debugging paths and composite variables.

- powershell: |
    gci 'env:' | sort name | ft -wrap
  displayName: 'List environment variables'

It generates an output similar to this. Notice that the environment variables are sorted and the trailing Format-Table with the -wrap parameter will ensure the values are not cut off at the end of the virtual line.

Name                           Value                                                                                   
----                           -----                                                                                   
agent.jobstatus                Succeeded                                                                               
AGENT_BUILDDIRECTORY           C:\agent\_work\35                                                                       
AGENT_DISABLELOGPLUGIN_TESTFIL true                                                                                    
EPUBLISHERPLUGIN                                                                                                       
AGENT_DISABLELOGPLUGIN_TESTRES true                                                                                    
ULTLOGPLUGIN                                                                                                           
AGENT_HOMEDIRECTORY            C:\agent
Path                           C:\agent\_work\_tool\NuGet\4.3.0\x64;C:\agent\externals\git\cmd;C:\wind
                               ows\system32;C:\windows;C:\windows\System32\Wbem;C:\windows\System32\Wi
                               ndowsPowerShell;You_Get_The_Idea

If you only want to display the environment variables when System.Debug is set to ‘true’ add the following condition to the code.

# Display all environment variables.
- powershell: |
      gci 'env:' | sort name | ft -wrap
  condition: eq(variables['system.debug'], 'true')
  displayName: 'List environment variables'

Print all Folders under Source Folder

If I am debugging loading multiple repositories or just need to get confirmation that everything has loaded correctly. I display a tree view of the folders in my workspace. 

- script: tree /a
  displayName: Tree view of project folders.

Notice that I have to use the /a option so that plus signs (+), hyphens (-), and vertical bars(|) be used to draw the tree diagram. This way the we don’t get a bunch of invalid symbols when you look at the results.

C:.
+---CheetahWheelies_BuildResources
|   +---MSBuild
|   |   \---Falcon43
|   \---Utilities
|       \---SDK-4.3
\---CheetahWheelies
    +---ProductX
    |   +---ProductX
    |   |   +---Core
    |   |   |   +---Interfaces
    |   |   |   \---Rules
    |   |   +---CommonCode

Print all Files and Folders under Source Folder

For a deep dive, this snippet will print every file in the file system at and below the folder starting at a specified location. This is just an extension of the tree command shown above.

- script: tree "$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)" /a /f
  displayName: Tree view of project artifact files and folders.

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