How to check if installed extensions are used in pipelines

Question

I would like to check which custom installed extensions from VS Marketplace are used in both build and deployment pipelines.

Does Azure DevOps provide any view for that or must it be done manually?

Would tremendously help for extension management.

We are using on premise server ver.: 18.181.31230.2 (Azure DevOps Server 2020 Update 1)

Answer 1

If you're not using YAML pipelines yet, then this extension will allow you to easily query which tasks are used where:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=solidify-labs.build-task-explorer

For YAML it's harder since there are multiple ways to template these things and multiple ways to reference a task (by name, by guid, by full name). But when you query the timeline of an actual executed job you'll be able to easily extract the guides and names of the tasks. But you'll need to go fancy with the REST API.

Answer 2

For what it worth, here is a powershell made to check custom task extensions usage in classic Releases but for Azure DevOps Services :

https://github.com/godev99/ps1/blob/main/azdevops_taskext_report.ps1

Quite dirty and messy but it might help.

Answer 3

We currently do not have any method to monitor a pipeline task extension is being used by which pipelines.

Yes, the only way is manual check. You need to check the definitions of all the pipelines in the collection to see which are using the pipeline task extension.

Answer 4

You can make all your pipelines searchable by using this tool: ExportPipelineDefinitions

It will export all your pipelines to disk so you can search them using "Find in files" in a search tool such as Visual Studio or VS Code.

You can search for a custom installed extension, a task name, a code snippet -- any character sequence your pipeline definitions are likely to contain.

I help manage a couple of hundred pipelines and consider this tool essential.