Azure DevOps pills: Avoid triggering pipelines continuous integration with commit message

When you push frequently you can avoid triggering continuous integration with a simple comment

There are situation when you need to push frequently on a Git repository, a typical example is when you are authoring a yaml pipeline and you are experimenting stuff; in such a situation you modify the pipeline, push, test and go on. It is quite common to push really frequently and this usually saturate standard pipelines.

It is not uncommon to have a standard pipeline of build and test running for each commit and for each branch. In such a situation if you push too often you risk to saturate all of your build agents.

When you push too often, agents tend to be saturated

Sometimes I heard some dirty trick to avoid this, but luckily enough, Azure DevOps pipelines have (as all other CI engines) some predetermined tokens that stops triggering a build if presents in a comment. For those used to TFS in the old days, this token was ***NO_CI***. This means that if you include ***NO_CI*** in a Git or TFVC comment, this commit (or changeset in TFVC) will not trigger any pipeline.

There was a bug in the past where ***NO_CI*** was not honored in AzureDevOps pipeline, but now, accordingly to this issue everything was solved, and we have also other token that we can use, like [skyp ci] and others.

You can find the details on this answer to related GitHub issue on pipelines agent GH repository. We have now plenty of ways to prevent pipeline to start upon commit (maybe too much :))

All possible tokens to prevent triggering of a build Figure 1: All possible tokens to prevent triggering of a build

Gian Maria.