无法从阶段变量组设置环境名称

Question

I have a deployment job that refers to environment . I want to set this environment name with a variable from a variable group.

The issue is, it does not expand the name when I put then variable group at the stage (or job) level. However it works fine when I put the variable group at the pipeline level.

My questions are:

1. Am I doing it wrong, or what is the reason for this behaviour?
2. How can I tell whether variable needs to be defined at stage or pipeline level?

  - stage: Web_STG
    variables:
    - group: StageEnv # if the Web.EnvironmentName variable is defined here it does not work
    ...
    - deployment: DeployWeb_STG
      environment:
        name: $(Web.EnvironmentName.Stg) # only works if variable group is linked at pipeline level
        resourceType: VirtualMachine

Answer 1

So a couple of thoughts here. First is there a reason you are using a variable group over a variable YAML template? If there are secrets then a group is the preferred way; however, if it is static text a variable YAML template could make more sense since all the values will be under Source Control. To learn more here is a MS blog post on this very topic with variable templates and environments .

Also you are defining the variable at the Macro level right before the task runs. I would recommend using it as a template expression via ${{ variables.Web.EnvironmentName.Stg }} This would ensure expansion when the pipeline is expanded.

For your second question variables have a defined scope at the pipeline, stage, or job. This is a security feature as think each job could be dispatched to a separate agent. As such Pipeline jobs that only need access to say a dev secret will have these values only available if the deployment job has the variables scoped correctly.

An additional troubleshooting step you can take is to download the expanded-pipeline.yml file form the logs. This will show the full variable expansion that is occurring to confirm if you are getting the correct variable population you are expecting.