azd hooks vs CI/CD pipelines

[lechnerc77]

Hi community,

I have a point I would like to discuss: with the advent of the hooks in azd several new options to enhance the functionality of azd are available.

One interesting scenario was shown in the February community standup, where a service lifecycle event hook was leveraged to execute the tests defined in the app before doing the deployment. Thinking a bit about this scenario raises the question in my mind of what to put into the azd definition and what to put into a CI/CD pipeline.
Although I like the spin of keeping things self-contained and having this step as part of the azure.yaml, I think I would have put that a s a dedicated step in a GitHub action as this is at least from my perspective more explicit while "hiding" this as part of the azd is more implicit.

Although I think there is no "right" or "wrong" here, I would be very interested in hearing your opinions on this topic.

[rajyraman]

@jongio - Since there is no context passed to the hooks, what is the real advantage of using hooks vs doing this entirely in the pipeline/workflow?

[vhvb1989]

@rajyraman, using hooks would work both locally and from CI/CD.
The hooks also gets the env-vars from azd automatically.

[rajyraman]

@vhvb1989 - Please document this feature. It doesn't seem to be mentioned in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/developer/azure-developer-cli/manage-environment-variables or https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/developer/azure-developer-cli/azd-extensibility

[rajyraman]

@vhvb1989 - Please also clarify what this means for #1697

[vhvb1989]

Created: #2607 to track updating the hooks documentation. @wbreza @savannahostrowski @gracewilcox FYI

[vhvb1989]

@rajyraman , #1697 is about pulling the azd-env into your current terminal-session (regardless of running inside a hook).
You might want this when you are testing the script that is invoked by a hook without using azd. For example, for script foo.sh like

echo $AZD_ENV_VAR

If it is set as azd-hook, azd will automatically inject the environment and you would see the expected output (when azd runs the hook).
But if you run the foo.sh manually, you wouldn't see the expected output because the azd-env is not set in your terminal.

[savannahostrowski]

Wrong Grace! cc: @gkulin for docs