Rajeev Pentyala – Technical Blog on Power Platform, Azure and AI

In Azure DevOps, Variable groups store values and secrets that you might want to be passed into a YAML pipeline or make available across multiple pipelines.

Variable Group is a collection of variables with Name and Value pair.

Below is my variable Group ‘BillingSystemDictionary’ with 3 variables in my DevOps organization ‘RajeevPentyala0011’ and project ‘Demo’ (These details are required in PowerShell script).

In DevOps pipeline scenarios, you may need to fetch the variables under a variable group. Following is the PowerShell script which calls DevOps API and fetch variables by variable group name.

    # Form API authentication Header
    $headers = New-Object "System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary[[String],[String]]"
    $headers.Add("Authorization", "Bearer $(System.AccessToken)")
    $headers.Add("Content-Type", "application/json")

    # Pass Variable Group Name and read variables
    $variableGroupName = "BillingSystemDictionary"
    # 'projectid' pattern is https://dev.azure.com/{organization_name}/{projectname}
    $projectid = "https://dev.azure.com/RajeevPentyala0011/Demo"

    $variableGroupGetUrl = "$projectid/_apis/distributedtask/variablegroups?groupName=$variableGroupName*&queryOrder=IdDescending&api-version=6.0-preview.2"

    $queryResponseObject = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $variableGroupGetUrl -Method GET -Headers $headers
 
    # $queryResponseObject will be of type pscustomobject
    # To fetch the variable value of "isactive"
    $variableName = "isactive"
    $variableValue = $queryResponseObject.value.variables.$variableName.value
    Write-Host "$variableName value is $variableValue"

🙂