Deploying Bicep from Azure DevOps with the new BicepDeploy@0 task

For a long time, deploying Bicep through Azure DevOps wasn’t a clear choice. You could use the Azure resource group deployment task. You could have created something custom with the Azure CLI. Or you used a combination with the Azure PowerShell task and used the available PowerShell commands.

All of those solutions work. But they don’t quite feel like a native Bicep experience. That finally changed.

A few months ago, the Bicep team already introduced a GitHub Actions experience for Bicep deployment. After that was released, you saw it already coming that another request for Azure DevOps landed.

Now, if you looked at the recent Bicep community call, I was happy to see Sneha Bandla present the new native task BicepDeploy@0. The task can work directly with .bicep or .bicepparam files, install and cache the Bicep CLI version, and run validation operations (including what-if).

In this post, you will see where BicepDeploy@0 fits, what problem it solves, and how to start using it in an Azure DevOps pipeline.

A quick look at Bicep Deploy

Before looking at the new task, it’s good to look back a bit. The Bicep CLI has always been laid-back when it comes to deployment automation. Yes, the language is…