Passing boolean parameters to PowerShell scripts in Azure DevOps Pipeline

Let’s start from the problem, I have an Azure DevOps pipeline that calls a PowerShell script and the team needs to change the pipeline allowing a boolean parameter to be passed to the PowerShell script when you queue the pipeline. The first tentative produces this error:

1
2
3
4

C:\a\_work\56\s\build.dotnet.ps1 : 
Cannot process argument transformation on parameter 'forceInstallPackage'. Cannot 
convert value "System.String" to type "System.Boolean". 
Boolean parameters accept only Boolean values and numbers, 

The original code of the pipeline is the following one.

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27

parameters:

...

- name: force_install_packages
    displayName: 'Force installation of PowerShell build utils module'
    default: false
    type: boolean
  
variables:

- name: ForceInstallPackages
  value: ${{ parameters.force_install_packages }}

...

jobs:
- job: Build_net
  
  - task: PowerShell@2
    name: Build_powershell
    displayName: "Build .NET in PowerShell"
    continueOnError: false
    inputs:
      targetType: filePath
      filePath: $(Build.SourcesDirectory)/build.dotnet.ps1 
      arguments: -Configuration $(BuildConfiguration) -deployWeb $true -forceInstallPackage $(ForceInstallPackages) ...

This is a simple trick I taught to people, create a Parameter (it allows you to specify the value at queue time), then create a variable that reference the parameter so everything in the pipeline is referenced with $(variableName) syntax. But in this situation we have a problem, a boolean variable will contain real true/false value but when you convert to a variable it will become a string. If you pass variable value to a PowerShell boolean value it will throw error because it expects $true or $false.

PowerShell boolean values can be converted from normal string containing $true or $false

The solution is simple, just prepend $ character to the variable

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

 - task: PowerShell@2
    name: Build_powershell
    displayName: "Build .NET in PowerShell"
    continueOnError: false
    inputs:
      targetType: filePath
      filePath: $(Build.SourcesDirectory)/build.dotnet.ps1 
      arguments: -Configuration $(BuildConfiguration) -deployWeb $true -forceInstallPackage $$(ForceInstallPackages) 
      workingDirectory: $(Build.SourcesDirectory)

As you can see in line 8 we have a double dollar sign, the first one is a standard Dollar char the second one is used to reference variable ForceInstallPackage. This trick is used to pass the correct value to PowerShell because it will prepend dollar sign to string true/false variable value.

Now we can just queue the pipeline for another run.

Figure 1: Parameter is available at queue time

As you can see Force installation of PowerShell build utils module is rendered as a checkbox (it is a boolean parameter) but it is passed to PowerShell script correctly.

Gian Maria.