Azure DevOps Classic Release Pipelines: Read Variables in a Variable Group and Update Azure App Service AppSettings

In this post let's see how to read variables in a Variable Group and deploy them to Azure App Service as app settings from a Classic Azure DevOps Release Pipeline.

In the release pipeline I have Azure CLI task added and the release pipeline is running on Azure Hosted windows-latest agent.

Release Pipeline

In the Azure CLI task, I am doing the following.

Acquire a PAT (Personal Access Token) and set it.

$PAT = "<YOUR_PAT>"
$env:AZURE_DEVOPS_EXT_PAT = $PAT

Now set the default organization and project for az devops command.

az devops configure --defaults `
    organization=https://dev.azure.com/<YOUR_ORGANIZATION>/ `
    project=<YOUR_PROJECT>

Get list of variables in the variable group by Variable Group Id. You can find Variable Group Id in the URL of the Variable Group detail page.

$variablesJson = az pipelines variable-group variable list `
    --group-id <YOUR_VARIABLE_GROUP_ID> `
    --org https://dev.azure.com/<YOUR_ORGANIZATION>/ `
    --project <YOUR_PROJECT>

If we output $variablesJson, it would be something like following.

{
  "SomeOptions__Key1": {
    "isSecret": null,
    "value": "<Value1>"
  },
  "SomeOptions__Key2": {
    "isSecret": null,
    "value": "<Value2>"
  }
}

Convert the $variablesJson to app settings format that Azure App Service expects.

$variablesAppSettings = $variablesJson `
    | ConvertFrom-Json `
    | ForEach-Object { $_.PSObject.Properties } `
    | ForEach-Object `
    {
        $key = $_.Name
        $value = $_.Value.value
        @{ 
            name = $key;
            slotSetting = $false;
            value = $value 
        }
    }

Save the app settings to a temporary file.

ConvertTo-Json $variablesAppSettings | Out-File "$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\appsettings-updated.json"

appsettings-updated.json would look like below.

[
  {
    "name": "SomeOptions__Key1",
    "value": "<Value1>",
    "slotSetting": false
  },
  {
    "name": "SomeOptions__Key2",
    "value": "<Value2>",
    "slotSetting": false
  }
]

Now finally update the app settings in the web app.

$resourceGroup = "<resourceGroup>"
$webAppName = "<webAppName>"
 
az webapp config appsettings set `
    --resource-group $resourceGroup `
    --name $webAppName `
    --settings "@$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\appsettings-updated.json"

Hope this helps.

Happy Coding.

Regards,

Jaliya