Azure DevOps Sprint Update: Cross Staging Variables supported natively

Great news! Rob Ros and I posted about on how to solve the problem of having variables across stages:

Robs blog post

https://rajbos.github.io/blog/2020/04/17/Azure-DevOps-update-release-variable-across-stages

And mine

Robs approach is for classic pipelines and mine was for YAML pipelines which was inspired by a PR from . But it was not very natively possible.

But now with the new Sprint update 168 from May 4th 2020 it is possible. Now the question: How do you create an output variable in a YAML pipeline? It is fairly easy!

powershell: "Write-Host '##vso[task.setvariable variable=foo;isOutput=true]bar'"

You basically use PowerShell to persist a new variable. And according to their documentation, it should work like the following.

trigger:
- master

resources:
- repo: self

pool:
  vmImage: 'ubuntu-16.04'

variables:
  MyVar: 'MyVal'

stages:
- stage: Save_Variable

  jobs:
  - job: Save_Variable
    steps:
      - pwsh: Write-Host "##vso[task.setvariable variable=MyVar;isOutput=true]NewVal"
        name: MyOutputVar

- stage: Read_Variables
  dependsOn: Save_Variable
  
  jobs:
    - job: Read_Variable
      variables: 
        prevStageVar: $[stageDependencies.Save_Variable.Save_Variable.outputs['MyOutputVar.MyVar']]
      steps:
      - powershell: 'Write-Host "Get Stage variable: $(prevStageVar)"'

I am not 100% sure since the rollout still has to happen, but it is very similar as you would do it cross-job in the same stage.

Also published on Medium.