Environments are not automatically created in Azure Devops when declared in yaml pipeline config

Question

I'm new to Azure Devops. I would like to have devops pipeline environments to be created automatically during pipeline flow. So the 5th line below should create environment if it does not exist:

  - deployment: Deploy
    displayName: Deploy job
    pool:
      vmImage: $(vmImageName)
    environment: 'production'

Instead I'm getting:

What am I missing?

To automate environment creation I could also use Terraform but this time I cannot find terraform resource config responsible for that.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem and found that the documentation lists some possible reasons for why this can happen:

Quote from learn.microsoft.com :

Q: Why am I getting error "Job XXXX: Environment XXXX could not be found. The environment does not exist or has not been authorized for use"?

A: These are some of the possible reasons of the failure:

• When you author a YAML pipeline and refer to an environment that does not exist in the YAML file, Azure Pipelines automatically creates the environment in some cases:

  • You use the YAML pipeline creation wizard in the Azure Pipelines web experience and refer to an environment that hasn't been created yet.
  • You update the YAML file using the Azure Pipelines web editor and save the pipeline after adding a reference to an environment that does not exist.

• In the following flows, Azure Pipelines does not have information about the user creating the environment: you update the YAML file using another external code editor, add a reference to an environment that does not exist, and then cause a manual or continuous integration pipeline to be triggered. In this case, Azure Pipelines does not know about the user. Previously, we handled this case by adding all the project contributors to the administrator role of the environment. Any member of the project could then change these permissions and prevent others from accessing the environment.

• If you are using runtime parameters for creating the environment, it will fail as these parameters are expanded at run time. Environment creation happens at compile time, so we have to use variables to create the environment.

• A user with stakeholder access level cannot create the environment as stakeholders do not access to repository.

In our case, the problem was using runtime parameters for creating the environment. You have the environment name 'production' hardcoded, so your problem might be related to one of the other cases.