The NEW Manual Validation Task for Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines Demystified

With the newly released Manual Validation task you can pause a YAML pipeline mid-stage. This allows you to perform manual or offline activities and then resume (or reject) the run.

Intro

As I've mentioned, you can use this new task in a YAML pipeline to pause a run within a stage, typically to perform some manual actions or validations, and then resume/reject the run.

This is especially useful in scenarios where you want to pause a pipeline and validate configuration settings, build package, etc. before moving on to a long-running, compute-intensive job.

When the Manual validation task is activated during a pipeline, it displays a message bar containing a link that opens the Manual validation dialog containing the instructions. After carrying out the manual steps, the administrator or user can choose to resume the run or reject it.

Demo

Let's see this in action. We will cover how to configure Azure Pipelines to use it and how to use it.

Here you have the video with the whole demo and explanation.

Limitations

Remember that, as I've mentioned in the video, you can use this new approach only in an agentless job of a YAML pipeline. If like in my example you have other jobs already, you would need to add a job with pool: server to make this work.