Conditional Values in Azure Pipelines

In some cases, you may want to change the value of an Azure Pipeline variable depending on the environment data. When I was looking for a way to do this, I couldn’t find many examples, so I’ll describe my solution here, maybe it will help you too.

Normally, a condition is prepared as follows.

  variables:
    - name: AZ_IS_MAIN_DEPLOYMENT
      value: $[eq(variables['Build.SourceBranch'], 'refs/heads/main')]

Here, the Variable AZ_IS_MAIN_DEPLOYMENT gets a true or false, depending on the branch. In later steps you use the variable to control tasks, steps and so on by set the conditionvalue. But in my underlying use case, I needed a condition where the value of my variable gets an production or dev value (Btw, it was for the deployment slot of a Static Web App 😉)

My solution is to set a variable value by use the key word if in a kind of attribute on top of the variable value.

variables:
  - name: AZ_DEPLOYMENT_ENV_NAME
    ${{ if eq(variables['Build.SourceBranch'], 'refs/heads/main') }}:
      value: production
    ${{ else }}:
      value: dev

Very important is the indentation of value here. It will not work, if it’s not set.

I’ve not tested a else if condition yet. Feel free to do so and let me know if it works.