Aspire CLI --skip(-steps) flag

[lvde0]

With Aspire 13 we can now define arbitrary steps for our publish and deploy pipelines. What I would really like to see is something like a --skip(-step) or --exclude(-step) flag that allows to skip/disable certain steps of the pipeline.

For instance, aspire deploy --skip build-* would skip any image build steps (if the images were already built before) or aspire deploy --skip publish could skip any unnecessary publishing when deploying. This is especially useful in CI/CD environments where steps are often spread over multiple "stages" and we want to avoid doing work multiple times.

[davidfowl]

Skipping steps would break if the state required from the previous step wasn't provided to the running step. How are you solving that problem?

[lvde0]

If required state is missing (and there's no way to recover from it) it should just throw. It would be up to the user to make sure that they don't break any dependency chains. The use cases I mentioned above would only work if the user ran build-* or publish manually before.
A different strategy would be heavy caching for each step that ensures no work is done twice. Ideally there would be some interface that lets steps easily consume the output of the previous step.

[KennethHoff]

I just started testing out custom Pipelines and being able to temporarily skip the publishing (and use the old artifact) for testing deployment would be nice.

dotnet do publish-my-new-resource --skip-step publish-my-new-resource