Does az bicep pulish file run az bicep build?

[JFolberth]

Working with a customer who has nested local bicep modules. They'd like to leverage Bicep Registries and they attempted to publish just their main.bicep file into the registry without the subsequent modules.

To their surprise this worked! My question is does az bicep publish run an az bicep build behind the scenes and publish the resulting ARM template to the registry? I could not find this information on either the registry documentation nor the az bicep publish command.

[ahelland]

From PublishCommand.cs:
// can't publish if we can't compile :)

But basically I only run az bicep build when I have specific needs for reading the json output, or for that matter if I purely want to do a linter run on my code (before publishing or deploying).

[jeskew]

does az bicep publish run an az bicep build behind the scenes and publish the resulting ARM template to the registry?

Yes. The registry stores compiled JSON templates, which is why you can publish a module using one version of Bicep and then deploy a template that references that module with an earlier version of Bicep without worrying about compatibility.