Question

Your team runs an Azure Pipelines YAML pipeline on a Microsoft-hosted ubuntu-latest agent. The build job requires a very specific version of Node.js (18.14.2) plus several native build tools that are not present on the hosted image, and you want to avoid spending several minutes each run installing them with a script step. You already publish a prebuilt Docker image containing exactly the required toolchain to your Azure Container Registry. What is the most efficient way to have the build steps execute inside that toolchain image on the hosted agent?

Accepted Answer

Define a container resource pointing to the ACR image and reference it with the job-level 'container' keyword so all steps run inside that container.

Answer

Add a Docker@2 task with the 'run' command as the first step so subsequent script steps execute in the container context.

Answer

Register a self-hosted agent inside the container image and target its pool from the pipeline.

Answer

Use a deployment job with the 'runOnce' strategy and set the image name in the environment resource.