fix: redundant CLI downloads [HEAD-450][HEAD-504][HEAD-505]

[asaf92]

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[CLAassistant]

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[jessehouwing]

Have you folks looked into the official tool installer and the tool caching directory for the Azure Pipelines Agent?

[asaf92]

@jessehouwing

Have you folks looked into the official tool installer and the tool caching directory for the Azure Pipelines Agent?

I'm not familiar with neither, but it sounds like there's a way to save us some cloud costs so I'm interested!
I assume pipeline caching can be a solution for the CLI downloads, but what's the "official tool installer"?

[jessehouwing]

Tool lib is here:

https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-tool-lib

It provides a set of standard APIs and a naming convention to store tools on the agent in a way that allows multiple jobs to use them, but also shields multiple agents installed on the same machine from eachother.

The tools are installed in the agent's _tools folder by version by default and you'd normally add the tool path to the shell's path. Alternatively you can set a hidden variable with the path to the tool.

Example here:

https://github.com/microsoft/azure-devops-extension-tasks/tree/main/BuildTasks/TfxInstaller/v4

In this case the tool installer was broken out into a separate task, but you can merge the 2 together.

The tool installer can maybe be extended with the caching features native to Azure DevOps to store a copy of the tool in the Organization's cache to speed up downloads and reduce bandwidth. Let me check with the Azure Pipelines Team to see if this option exists.

The agent has a build-in caching plugin, but I'm unsure how to leverage this from a custom task outside of the built-in Cache@2 tasks. Extending the Snyk docs on how to configure caching to speed up hosted builds is probably useful anyway.

[bastiandoetsch]

Do we actually use GZIP compression on the downloads here? Would be good, too :).

[PeterSchafer]

Let's see if these changes fix the immediate issues we are seeing and add an improvement task for using the proposed tooling support.

Thanks a lot @jessehouwing for bringing this to our attention!

[jessehouwing]

@PeterSchafer ✅

I also added 2 PRs some time back to improve the representation of the extension on the marketplace.

• Redirect marketplace Q&A to Support #154
• Consider adding Git Repo details #155

I think they may have gotten lost in the team transfer.

[snyksec]

🎉 This PR is included in version 1.1.3 🎉

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