Configure schedules for pipelines
TFS 2018
Note
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2018 and earlier versions have the following differences in naming:
- Pipelines for build and release are called definitions
- Runs are called builds
- Service connections are called service endpoints
- Stages are called environments
- Jobs are called phases
Azure Pipelines provides several types of triggers to configure how your pipeline starts.
- Scheduled triggers start your pipeline based on a schedule, such as a nightly build. This article provides guidance on using scheduled triggers to run your pipelines based on a schedule.
- Event-based triggers start your pipeline in response to events, such as creating a pull request or pushing to a branch. For information on using event-based triggers, see Triggers in Azure Pipelines.
You can combine scheduled and event-based triggers in your pipelines, for example to validate the build every time a push is made (CI trigger), when a pull request is made (PR trigger), and a nightly build (Scheduled trigger). If you want to build your pipeline only on a schedule, and not in response to event-based triggers, ensure that your pipeline doesn't have any other triggers enabled. For example, YAML pipelines in a GitHub repository have CI triggers and PR triggers enabled by default. For information on disabling default triggers, see Triggers in Azure Pipelines and navigate to the section that covers your repository type.
Scheduled triggers
Examples
Cron syntax
Scheduled runs view
Running even when there are no code changes
Note
Scheduled builds always run on schedule regardless of code changes on TFS 2018.1 and lower.
By default, your pipeline doesn't run as scheduled if there have been no code changes since the last successful scheduled run. For instance, consider that you've scheduled a pipeline to run every night at 9:00pm. During the weekdays, you push various changes to your code. The pipeline runs as per schedule. During the weekends, you don't make any changes to your code. If there have been no code changes since the scheduled run on Friday, then the pipeline doesn't run as scheduled during the weekend.
Limits on the number of scheduled runs in YAML pipelines
There are certain limits on how often you can schedule a pipeline to run. These limits have been put in place to prevent misuse of Azure Pipelines resources, particularly the Microsoft-hosted agents. The limits are:
- around 1000 runs per pipeline per week
- 10 runs per pipeline per 15 minutes