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Continuous Deployment with Azure DevOps

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Important

Custom Commands will be retired on April 30th 2026 and starting October 30th 2023 you will not be able to create new Custom Commands applications in Speech Studio. Related to this change, LUIS will be retired on October 1st 2025 and starting April 1st 2023 you will not be able to create new LUIS resources.

In this article, you learn how to set up continuous deployment for your Custom Commands applications. The scripts to support the CI/CD workflow are provided to you.

Prerequisite

  • A Custom Commands application for development (DEV)
  • A Custom Commands application for production (PROD)
  • Sign up for Azure Pipelines

Export/Import/Publish

The scripts are hosted at Voice Assistant - Custom Commands. Clone the scripts in the bash directory to your repository. Make sure you maintain the same path.

Set up a pipeline

  1. Go to Azure DevOps - Pipelines and click "New Pipeline"

  2. In Connect section, select the location of your repository where these scripts are located

  3. In Select section, select your repository

  4. In Configure section, select "Starter pipeline"

  5. Next you'll get an editor with a YAML file, replace the "steps" section with this script.

    steps:
- task: Bash@3
  displayName: 'Export source app'
  inputs:
    targetType: filePath
    filePath: ./bash/export.sh
    arguments: '-r westus2 -s $(SubscriptionKey) -c $(Culture) -a $(SourceAppId) -f ExportedDialogModel.json'
    workingDirectory: bash
    failOnStderr: true

- task: Bash@3
  displayName: 'Import to target app'
  inputs:
    targetType: filePath
    filePath: ./bash/import.sh
    arguments: '-r westus2 -s $(SubscriptionKey) -c $(Culture) -a $(TargetAppId) -f ExportedDialogModel.json'
    workingDirectory: bash
    failOnStderr: true

- task: Bash@3
  displayName: 'Train and Publish target app'
  inputs:
    targetType: filePath
    filePath: './bash/train-and-publish.sh'
    arguments: '-r westus2 -s $(SubscriptionKey) -c $(Culture) -a $(TargetAppId)'
    workingDirectory: bash
    failOnStderr: true

  6. Note that these scripts assume that you are using the region westus2, if that's not the case update the arguments of the tasks accordingly

    Screenshot that highlights the region value in the arguments.

  7. In the "Save and run" button, open the dropdown and click "Save"

Hook up the pipeline with your application

  1. Navigate to the main page of the pipeline.

  2. In the top-right corner dropdown, select Edit pipeline. It gets you to a YAML editor.

  3. In the top-right corner next to "Run" button, select Variables. Select New variable.

  4. Add these variables:

    Variable Description
    SourceAppId ID of the DEV application
    TargetAppId ID of the PROD application
    SubscriptionKey The key used for both applications
    Culture Culture of the applications (en-us)

    Send Activity payload

  5. Select "Run" and then select the "Job" running.

    You should see a list of tasks running that contains: "Export source app", "Import to target app" & "Train and Publish target app"

Deploy from source code

In case you want to keep the definition of your application in a repository, we provide the scripts for deployments from source code. Since the scripts are in bash, If you are using Windows you'll need to install the Linux subsystem.

The scripts are hosted at Voice Assistant - Custom Commands. Clone the scripts in the bash directory to your repository. Make sure you maintain the same path.

Prepare your repository

  1. Create a directory for your application, in our example create one called "apps".

  2. Update the arguments of the bash script below, and run. It will import the dialog model of your application to the file myapp.json

    bash/export.sh -r <region> -s <subscriptionkey> -c en-us -a <appid> -f apps/myapp.json
    Arguments Description
    region Your Speech resource region. For example: westus2
    subscriptionkey Your Speech resource key.
    appid the Custom Commands' application ID you want to export.

  3. Push these changes to your repository.

Set up a pipeline

  1. Go to Azure DevOps - Pipelines and click "New Pipeline"

  2. In Connect section, select the location of your repository where these scripts are located

  3. In Select section, select your repository

  4. In Configure section, select "Starter pipeline"

  5. Next you'll get an editor with a YAML file, replace the "steps" section with this script.

    steps:
- task: Bash@3
  displayName: 'Import app'
  inputs:
    targetType: filePath
    filePath: ./bash/import.sh
    arguments: '-r westus2 -s $(SubscriptionKey) -c $(Culture) -a $(TargetAppId) -f ../apps/myapp.json'
    workingDirectory: bash
    failOnStderr: true

- task: Bash@3
  displayName: 'Train and Publish app'
  inputs:
    targetType: filePath
    filePath: './bash/train-and-publish.sh'
    arguments: '-r westus2 -s $(SubscriptionKey) -c $(Culture) -a $(TargetAppId)'
    workingDirectory: bash
    failOnStderr: true

    Note

    these scripts assume that you are using the region westus2, if that's not the case update the arguments of the tasks accordingly

  6. In the "Save and run" button, open the dropdown and click "Save"

Hook up the pipeline with your target applications

  1. Navigate to the main page of the pipeline.

  2. In the top-right corner dropdown, select Edit pipeline. It gets you to a YAML editor.

  3. In the top-right corner next to "Run" button, select Variables. Select New variable.

  4. Add these variables:

    Variable Description
    TargetAppId ID of the PROD application
    SubscriptionKey The key used for both applications
    Culture Culture of the applications (en-us)

  5. Select "Run" and then select the "Job" running. You should see a list of tasks running that contains: "Import app" & "Train and Publish app"

Next steps

See samples on GitHub