Skip to content

How to Retry a Failing Task in Azure Pipelines

Azure Pipelines re-runs a failing step automatically with retryCountOnTaskFailure.

Add retryCountOnTaskFailure to a task: or script: step. Azure re-runs that step up to that many times on failure.

Retry a flaky step

This step is retried up to twice on failure before the job is marked failed.

azure-pipelines.yml

steps:
  - script: npm run test:integration
    displayName: Integration tests
    retryCountOnTaskFailure: 2

Gotchas

retryCountOnTaskFailure retries only that step; it does not re-run the whole job.
It retries on any failure - do not put it on test steps where a real failure should stop the run.
There is no built-in backoff; for delay-and-retry on a single command, script a bash loop instead.

Related guides

How to Retry a Failing Step in GitHub ActionsRetry a flaky step in GitHub Actions with a retry action or a bash loop with backoff, so transient network an… How to Set a Job Timeout in Azure PipelinesSet a job timeout in Azure Pipelines with timeoutInMinutes, the zero-means-unlimited caveat, and cancelTimeou…

Run this faster and cheaper on Latchkey managed runners. Start free →