Branch validation override not working

[mthalman]

When attempting to run an official pipeline on a non-official branch and setting the overrideOfficialBranchValidation variable to true, the pipeline will fail in the Validate Branch step:

##[error]Official builds must be done from an official branch (main) and repo prefix (public/,internal/private/,unlisted/).

This seems to be a regression from #1771 which changed the syntax that checks the overrideOfficialBranchValidation variable.

[lbussell]

What's the context in which you tried to use this?

For reference the syntax was changed as follows

- if ("$(overrideOfficialBranchValidation)" -eq "true")
+ "${{ variables['overrideOfficialBranchValidation'] }}" -eq "true"

Meaning that the override is now checked at template evaluation time instead of build time. The reason for this change is that the previous version of the check assumes that the variable is defined. If it isn't defined anywhere in the pipeline or the GUI, then the pipeline fails at this step. I did not want to define the variable in the AzDO GUI for every single new pipeline I created.

I see two options to fix this

• Use env var $OVERRIDEOFFICIALBRANCHVALIDATION to reference the variable at run-time.
• Add a top-level parameter for overrideOfficialBranchValidation to the pipeline you want to use it from, and use that parameter to set the variable in the template.

And I guess which one I pick depends on where you wanted to use this.

attempting to run an official pipeline on a non-official branch

My understanding is that this will be disallowed in the future

[mthalman]

I used it in this run (internal link), setting overrideOfficialBranchValidation as a variable in the AzDO UI. I did this because there doesn't yet exist an unofficial pipeline for that repo.

My understanding is that this will be disallowed in the future

Right. Nonetheless, this variable should either work correctly or be removed entirely.

[lbussell]

The issue in your pipeline is that publishRepoPrefix is now set at template evaluation time (via a pipeline parameter) in the publishConfig. The Validate Branch step is doing the correct thing because publishRepoPrefix is evaluated as public which comes from the production publish config. The publishRepoPrefix variable won't do anything anymore, to change it you need to pass it as a parameter into the pipeline and into the publish-config-prod.yml template.

[mthalman]

But overrideOfficialBranchValidation should override the validation check, regardless of what publishRepoPrefix is set to.

[lbussell]

Correct, there's two problems here.

[lbussell]

[Triage] After some discussion, we agreed to remove the reference to overrideOfficialBranchValidation variable.