Question

Your team maintains a shared Azure Pipelines YAML template, build-steps.yml, used by 15 repositories. Some repos are for .NET libraries that must run a code-signing step, while others are for internal tooling that must skip signing entirely. You want a single template where each consuming pipeline declares whether signing applies, and the signing steps are only emitted into the compiled pipeline when requested. Which template construct should you use?

Accepted Answer

Define a boolean parameter in the template and wrap the signing steps in a conditional insertion expression (${{ if parameters.enableSigning }})

Answer

Define a runtime variable named enableSigning and add a condition: eq(variables.enableSigning, 'true') to each signing task

Answer

Create two separate templates and require each repository to reference the correct one manually

Answer

Use a stage-level dependsOn with a custom expression to skip the signing job at runtime