Conditional Approval in pipeline jobs in azure pipelines - azure

Question

I want to customize environment attribute to choose programmatically environment for approval (dev, preprod, prod). When I try to launch pipeline, I see this error. Is there an alternative?
Job : Environment $(environment) could not be found. The environment does not exist or has not been authorized for use.
variables:
environment: dev
jobs:
- deployment: test
displayName: test
timeoutInMinutes: 0
# creates an environment if it doesn't exist
environment: $(environment)
strategy:
runOnce:
deploy:
steps:
- checkout: self
clean: true
displayName : Checkout repository
- task: NodeTool#0
inputs:
versionSpec: '16.x'
checkLatest: true

Answer 1

For this use case you should use parameters. This is because variables are not available during the initial parsing stage of the pipeline.
parameters:
- name: "environment"
type: string
default: "development"
And then environment: ${{ parameters.environment }}
Or if you want to get fancy, you could do something like this:
parameters:
- name: "environments"
type: object
default:
- name: development
param1: value
param2: value
- name: test
param1: value
param2: value
# This will look through the environment parameter and create a job for each environment.
- ${{ each environment in parameters.environments }} :
jobs:
- deployment: test
#read in vars from a file in variables/development.yml
variables: variables/${{ environment.name }}.yml
displayName: test
timeoutInMinutes: 0
# creates an environment if it doesn't exist
environment: ${{ environment.name }}
strategy:
runOnce:
deploy:
steps:
- checkout: self
clean: true
displayName : Checkout repository
- task: NodeTool#0
inputs:
versionSpec: '16.x'
checkLatest: true