How to do a simple string token replacement in Azure pipelines?

Question

In a YAML release pipeline, I need to do a simple replacement in the js files contained in the artifact coming from another pipeline. These files have a certain token (#TOKEN_URL#) that must be replaced in an Angular js bundled file.

The release has the following parameter that will determine the value to replace:

parameters:
- name: environment
  displayName: Environment
  type: string
  default: staging
  values:
  - staging
  - production

And also have the following variables:

variables:
  tokenUrl: '#TOKEN_URL#'
  tokenUrlValueProd: 'https://www.xxxx.com'
  tokenUrlValueTest: 'https://www.test-xxxx.com'

tokenUrl is the token to search in different JS and JSON files. The idea is to replace the '#TOKEN_URL#' whenever it appears with tokenUrlValueProd or tokenUrlValueTest, depending on the parameters.environment value.

I have found the tasks ReplaceTokens@1 and FileTransform@1 for replacements, but, in both cases, I don't see where to tell the token to search nor the values to put instead of the token.

Is there a simple way to do this?

Answer 1

It was a lot of trial and error until I could find a way. The selected answer in this link was also of great help, I had to check closely in the screenshots.

The documentation was not clear enough to me. I finally used ReplaceTokens@1 which works pretty similar to FileTransform@1, but it works obviously for tokens, while FileTransform@1 works for a certain structure in JSON and XML files.

First, I have a file with some tokens to be replaced:

  //Code fragment:
  urlServices: {
    urlServicesPayment: '#{tokenUrl}#/getSession',
  },

Initially it was something like '#TOKEN_URL#'. Then, to match the PascalCase in the Yaml variable names, I changed to: '#{TokenUrl}#'.

In my case, I have diferent values for test and prod, so I needed a setup like this:

  variables:  ##Job variables
    ${{ if eq(parameters.environment, 'production') }}:
      tokenUrl: 'https://www.xxxx.com'
    ${{ if eq(parameters.environment, 'test') }}:
      tokenUrl: 'https://www.test-xxxx.com)'

And the replacement task is just:

  - task: ReplaceTokens@1
    inputs:
      sourcePath: '$(Pipeline.Workspace)/dist'
      filePattern: '*.js'
      tokenRegex: '#{(\w+)}#'

• SourcePath is the path containing the files to transform
• FilePattern is a wildcard to process one or many files
• TokenRegex is the regex pattern to find the tokens that have names like my variables.

In this case '#{(\w+)}#' matches with '#{TokenUrl}#' and TokenUrl is the pipeline variable containing the value to replace. So, '#{TokenUrl}#' will become 'https://www.xxxx.com' inside the transformed file