Why are Build Artifacts called "drop" by default?

Why are Build Artifacts called "drop" by default? What does the word "drop" mean, literally?

Yes, you could understand it literally. You can understand it as the meaning of water-drop.

When we use the Publish Build Artifacts task, this task in a build pipeline to publish build artifacts to Azure Pipelines. Azure Pipelines is a server built on the cloud. When our artifact is downloaded from the cloud to the local, it is like a raindrop. So, it is named drop by default.

Is it a Microsoft thing or DevOps in general?

This should be the product of Azure devops (a Microsoft thing).

Hope this helps.

The way the docs read today it looks like artifactName is optional (which it is) and the default value is drop which it is not. It seems like the default name is constructed from the stage and job that called the task. _ are removed and the two items are concatenated with a .

the docs needs to be updated to indicate the correct default name.

Specify the name of the artifact that you want to create. It can be whatever you want. For example:

• task: PublishBuildArtifacts@1 inputs: pathToPublish: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)' artifactName: drop1
• task: PublishBuildArtifacts@1 inputs: pathToPublish: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)' artifactName: drop2