The Options tab allows you to set some options for the pipeline and the job behind the pipeline:
The Build properties section allows you to set information about the pipeline itself:
- Description: This is a detailed description you can use to explain what the pipeline does.
- Build number format: This is the number that the build engine sets over the build execution when the pipeline starts. You can use a fixed value, but the best approach is to generate the build number dynamically with an incremental value or by using the time at the moment the pipeline starts, as shown in the preceding screenshot. In the preceding screenshot, in fact, the build number is $(date:yyyyMMdd)$(rev:.r), which means that the build engine uses the current date at the start of the pipeline and generates a number composed by the concatenation of the year, the month, and the day followed by a daily revision number (for example, if the pipeline starts on July 7, 2019, the build number is 20190707.1).
- Status badge: In this section, you can find the Image URL and Markdown link to show the status badge of the build on your website.
The Build job section allows you to set up the timeout for the job executed by the agent (you will learn more about the agent and how it works later, in the The Tasks tab section):
- Build job authorization scope: This allows you to define the authorization scope for the build job. You must choose Project collection when you access multiple team projects; select Current project when you want to isolate the job to a particular team project.
- Build job timeout in minutes: Here, you can set the maximum amount of time a job can run before it is canceled by the server. For example, if you set it to 60 minutes, then if a job, for some reason, remains active for more then 60 minutes (for example, if it is blocked by some errors), the server will automatically cancel it and the build will fail. You can set an infinite timeout by simply putting zero in the textbox, but remember that you have a free fixed number of minutes for a build for a month, and if you set the timeout to be infinite, then you could consume them unnecessarily. For more information about the values you can set in this field, go to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/phases?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml&viewFallbackFrom=vsts#timeouts.
- Build job cancel timeout in minutes: This allows you to set a limit for the job cancel time.