Trigger Azure DevOps pipeline automatically using PowerShell

In many situations, we need to trigger pipelines automatically or from another pipeline (it may be another build pipeline or release pipeline). In my project, I had the same situation where I need to trigger the build from the release pipeline, in my case, the build (CI) pipeline is written in the YAML, and the release (CD) pipeline is configured in the classic editor.

How we can trigger pipelines automatically?

Trigger pipelines automatically can be achieved using Azure tasks or using PowerShell (can be done through the API using PowerShell). Using this, you can trigger a build or release pipeline from another pipeline within the same project or organization but also in another project or organization.

In this example, we will be going to discuss how we can achieve this through PowerShell using the API. in a future post, we can discuss how we can achieve using the task in Powershell.

Step: 1 Create the PAT token for Authorization

To get started, a Personal Access Token is required with the appropriate rights to execute pipelines. To generate a new Personal Access Token follow the link:

Step: 2 Enycrpt the PAT token

Always encrypt the pat token before using it in our script and kept the pat in Keyvalut. For this example, I used direct here for our example.

$token = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes(“:$($token)”))

Step: 3 Define the API and assign it to variable

This was the latest API version 7.0 which I am going to use for Triggering the pipeline automatically using PowerShell Azure DevOps. As the name implies, we can able to get the {organization}/{project} name easily. if you are new to Azure DevOps, they will struggle to find the {pipelineId}. please find the below snapshot for reference, after clicking on the pipeline which you need to trigger, there you are able to find the build?definitionid which is called as pipelineId.

Syntax : https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/{project}/_apis/pipelines/{pipelineId}/runs?api-version=7.0

$url=”https://dev.azure.com/myOrganization/Myproject/_apis/pipelines/4/runs?api-version=7.0″

 

step: 4 Pass the parameter in the body of API.

This action in required as there are a lot of branches in my repo and the build needs to understand from which branch the build needs to be triggered so I am going to pass the branch name for the pipeline.

$JSON = @’
{
“self”: { “refName”:”develop”},
}
‘@

Step: 5 Invoke the API to trigger pipelines automatically

In this example, I am going to use the PowerShell task to execute the below script as shown in the below snapshot to Trigger the pipeline automatically.

 

$response = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $url -Headers @{Authorization = “Basic $token”} -Method Post -Body $JSON -ContentType application/json

Full Code

 

See more