Make pipelines checkout faster with fetchDepth: 1 and fetchTags: false

[CraigMacomber]

Description

For small agents, the checkout step took:

• Before: 63 seconds
• After: 7 seconds

Repo policy check also showed the same change.

This also removes some console spam from all the tags and branches.

This seems like a nice win for pipeline performance, saving around a minute. Other pipelines on larger agents might benefit less.

Large agents, like used for client build show less of a gain:

• Before: 33 seconds
• After: 6 seconds

One test was found (and fixed) which depended on having tags present in the repo when the test ran.

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Note

Copilot was unable to run its full agentic suite in this review.

Speeds up Azure Pipelines checkout by adding fetchDepth: 1 and fetchTags: false to all checkout steps across the pipeline YAMLs, reducing checkout time significantly (e.g., 63s→7s on small agents). A unit test that depended on real git tags being present is refactored to mock the git client.

Changes:

• Add fetchDepth: 1 and fetchTags: false to every checkout step in the pipeline YAMLs.
• Refactor fromTag.test.ts to mock simpleGit so the test no longer relies on real tags being checked out.
• Keep the real-git variant of the test as a manually-enabled (skipped-by-default) path.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 17 out of 17 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
tools/pipelines/test-perf-benchmarks.yml	Shallow checkout for self and ff_pipeline_host.
tools/pipelines/templates/upload-telemetry/include-stage-upload-telemetry.yml	Shallow checkout for ff_pipeline_host.
tools/pipelines/templates/upload-server-manifest.yml	Shallow checkout for self.
tools/pipelines/templates/upload-dev-manifest.yml	Shallow checkout for self.
tools/pipelines/templates/include-test-real-service.yml	Shallow checkout for ff_pipeline_host and self.
tools/pipelines/templates/include-publish-npm-package-deployment.yml	Shallow checkout for self.
tools/pipelines/templates/include-publish-docker-service-steps.yml	Shallow checkout for self.
tools/pipelines/templates/include-policy-check.yml	Shallow checkout for self.
tools/pipelines/templates/build-npm-package.yml	Shallow checkout for build job.
tools/pipelines/templates/build-npm-client-package.yml	Shallow checkout in three build jobs.
tools/pipelines/templates/build-docker-service.yml	Shallow checkout for build job.
tools/pipelines/repo-policy-check.yml	Shallow checkout for self.
tools/pipelines/publish-api-model-artifact.yml	Shallow checkout in two stages.
tools/pipelines/deploy-website.yml	Shallow checkout across four stages.
tools/pipelines/build-performance-observability.yml	Shallow checkout for self.
tools/pipelines/build-docs.yml	Shallow checkout across five stages.
build-tools/packages/build-cli/src/test/commands/release/fromTag.test.ts	Mock simpleGit.tags/show so the test no longer depends on local tags; gate real-git path behind this.skip().

[CraigMacomber]

This is intended and documented.

[alexvy86]

This one would be my main concern, together with the corresponding one in include-publish-docker-service-steps.yml‎. As I mentioned in Teams, I think flub does need the tags to be available at some point during the release/publish process, but I can't recall where exactly. @tylerbutler might remember.

[alexvy86]

Besides the two referenced the comment above, I think all the other shallow clones are probably safe and worth it.

[CraigMacomber]

Some interesting cases are called out in a previous attempt at this in #26193 : I need to review those and accommodate them.