Resolving “TF401019: The Git repository with name or identifier xxxx does not exist or you do not have permissions for the operation you are attempting.” in Azure Pipelines git Submodule Checkout

Submodule in Git repos help you to keep the common code modules in a separate repo and utilize in multiple other repos. In the classic and YAML build pipelines you can checkout git submodules as explained in the post “Git Repo Submodule Checkout in Azure DevOps Build Pipelines”. However, you may encounter the below issue while running such build pipelines having to perform a git submodule checkout.

Cloning into 'D:/a/1/s/Infra/AzCLI'...

remote: TF401019: The Git repository with name or identifier InfraCLI does not exist or you do not have permissions for the operation you are attempting.

fatal: repository 'https://dev.azure.com/yourorg/DevOps/_git/yourrepo/' not found

fatal: clone of 'https://yourorg@dev.azure.com/yourorg/DevOps/_git/yourrepo' into submodule path 'D:/a/1/s/Infra/AzCLI' failed

Failed to clone 'Infra/AzCLI'. Retry scheduled

Azure Service Connection via Variable Group in YAML CD/Release Pipeline Templates

In application deployment we may use different Azure subscriptions to setup infrastructure for non-prod and production environment infrastructure most of the time. In classic release pipelines we could easily create a resource group to setup deployment task needs, which should be used in multiples stages/environments such as Dev, QA, staging or production. For such groups when the task group is using Azure App Service Deployment, Azure CLI tasks we could supply the service connection name via a variable that can be stored in a variable group relevant to the given stage/environment scope. In YAML we can use a template to define the common steps and it is ideal if we could refer to variable group, to hold the service connection information related to the relevant stage/environment. However, the possibility to use the variable group variable for service connection, regardless of whether using a template in YAML or Azure deploy steps used directly in pipeline YAML seems to be not working as expected. Let’s look at the problem and alternative solutions.