Question

Your team maintains a multi-stage Azure Pipelines YAML pipeline. When engineers manually queue the pipeline, they need to select a deployment target (dev, staging, or prod) from a dropdown before the run starts, and stages must be included or skipped based on that selection. The chosen value must be available at compile time so that entire stages can be conditionally excluded from the run. Which approach meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Define a runtime parameter of type string with allowed values and use it in stage-level conditions with template expression syntax (${{ if }}).

Answer

Define a pipeline variable in a variable group and reference it with macro syntax ($(target)) in each stage's condition property.

Answer

Set a variable at queue time using the 'Variables' tab and evaluate it with runtime expression syntax ($[ ]) in stage conditions.

Answer

Use a secret variable stored in Azure Key Vault and reference it through a variable group linked to the pipeline.