Azure DevOps pipeline running different version of a task compared to pipeline definition

Question

We recently had issues with our pipelines/ releases failing due to an update to the Ansible marketplace extension provided by Microsoft, additional details in the GitHub issue which is yet to be resolved: https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-extensions/issues/1428

One of the more concerning aspects of this is that pinning to the last good version did not resolve the issue as expected - runs prior to the issue using Ansible@0 show this as running Ansible@0.274.0, however when explicitly pinning to this patch version the pipeline logs show this is actually running Ansible@0.260.0, which was a known bad release last July.

So based on the above my question is threefold:

1. How do the pipelines check which version is supposed to run, and verify this is present on the agent running the task?
2. What validation is there that version numbers match between the marketplace extension, pipeline definitions and the task downloaded/ run on the agent?
3. How can existing versions of tasks which have already run be changed after they have been run?

Answer 1

Hi @Keith Summers ,

Azure Pipelines resolves tasks based on the task version metadata registered with the installed Marketplace extension. When a pipeline specifies Ansible@0, the major version is pinned, while minor and patch versions are resolved by the service and provided to the agent, which then downloads or uses a cached copy of the corresponding task package.

Under normal circumstances, the version shown in the pipeline definition, the version resolved by the service, and the task package executed by the agent should all align.

The behavior described here where runs previously reported Ansible@0.274.0, but explicitly pinning to that version resulted in 0.260.0 being executed suggests a discrepancy between the task metadata being resolved and the package actually delivered to the agent.

Completed pipeline runs themselves cannot be changed retroactively. However, if task metadata, extension packaging, or version mappings are updated after publication, it can lead to inconsistencies between historical records, displayed versions, and the task content available for execution. Hope this helps!

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