Renaming an Azure DevOps YAML pipeline: how hard could it be? Answer: really hard! Well, more like really hidden.

The Problem

When you create a new YAML Pipeline in Azure DevOps, the pipeline name defaults to the name of the Team Project. That's not awful when you only have one pipeline in the project but then when you create another pipeline, it appends something like "(1)" or "(2)" to the end of the name.

So if my team project is called "policy-research2", the first pipeline I create will be called "policy-research2". When I create the second YAML pipeline in AZDO, the name is "policy-research2 (1)". Kinda ugly, right? Yeah.

So how do you rename that?

The Solution

You'd think that you might be able to set a 'name' property in the YAML in order to rename the pipeline. Nope.

You'd think that you might be able to set the name when you're on the web editor for the pipeline. Nope.

The answer is buried in a menu. From the Pipelines page, select the All pipelines tab. This will show you a list of your pipelines something like the image below. Click the pipeline you'd like to rename.

You should now be on the summary page for the pipeline and you should be able to see the recent runs of your pipeline. In the upper-right, click the "..." menu button.

You should see a menu that looks like the one below and there should be an option that says Rename / move. That's what you want.

That'll bring up the Rename/move pipeline dialog. Enter the name that you want and click Save. BTW, if you want to organize your Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines into folders, you can also do that from this dialog.

After you click save, you should see the pipeline with the new name.

Summary

If you want to rename an existing Azure DevOps Pipeline and/or organize your pipelines into folders, you're going to want to find the Rename/move Pipeline dialog. From Pipelines, click into the pipeline you want to change, click the menu in the upper right, and choose Rename/move.

I hope this helps.

-Ben

-- Looking for help with Azure DevOps Pipelines? Got old XAML pipelines that you need converted to use the YAML or JSON-based builds? Need some help implementing Scrum or Kanban with Azure DevOps? We can help. Drop us a line at info@benday.com.