Copy Environment Across Team Projects in Azure DevOps

 We have dicussed how to "Copy Variable Groups Across Team Projects in Azure DevOps" in a previous post. In similar way we can use a scrip with Azure DevOps REST API to copy environment defined in Azure DevOps across team projects.

Set Value for a Secret Variable in Azure Release Pipelines while Triggering from Another Release

 You might want to trigger a release from another release pipeline, specially if you are deploying to a multi tenant application environment. In such cases when you trigger a pipeline from another pipeline the variables you are setting dynamically cannot be a secret variable. If you set a variable that should be settable at release time as a secret, the release cannot be triggerd via the Azure DevOps REST API call, as it will throw an exception such as below.

The 'secret' property of

variables cannot be altered while creating a release. Verify the value

provided for variables UserPwd at scope Release and try again.  

Let's try to understand bit more of the requirement.

Pull Request Report for Azure Git Repos

When you have several repos in your team project and if you want to obtain a report of pending pull requests, or even completed pull requests, you can use widget available here in your dashboards.Additionally pull request count widget also available in here. Individual repo based pull request dashboard widget also available in Azure DevOps. However, if you want a custom report, you can use REST API and create your own report.

Getting Content of a File in VSTS Git Repo

GItHub has a easy way to get raw contents of a file by clicking on Raw button for any code file in GitHub, where it will redirect to url starting with ‘https://raw.githubusercontent.com/’. For example the PowerShell script here can be viewed as raw content or retrieved programmatically using PowerShell using Invoke-WebRequest with url  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chamindac/VSTS_PS_Utils/master/CreateAzureWebApp/CreateAzureWebApp.ps1. Let’s look at possibility of retrieving raw content of a file in VSTS Git repo via VSTS REST API.

Check if a Build Definition Exists for a Given Repo in VSTS/TFS

In scenarios where you have many teams working in the same team project, you might have multiple TFS Git repos within a single team project. When you want to create a build definition for a given repo, you might be wondering what if there is a build definition already exists for the repo. Opening each build definition to find that out is a waste of time. Let’s look at a small utility script that can give you the information quickly using VSTS/TFS REST API.

Values of repositoryType Parameter in VSTS REST API

VSTS REST API is really useful in achieving automations in many aspects of the software development process, and it can be used to write some handy utilities to obtain information quickly with appealing formats. However, sometimes you have to bit struggle to find out which are the correct values to pass for some parameters expected by VSTS REST API, where the documentation does not provide much of a valid information. One such parameter is ‘repositoryType’ in documentation found here for listing build definitions, which does not give any information what are the expected values for the parameter.Documentation here gives some hint on what could be the values but does not have information for REST API expected values.

Setting VSTS Release Variable Values At the Time of Creating a Release

VSTS builds have the option to set build variable values at the time of queuing a build. You have to select option for build variable “Settable at queue time” to enable the variable to be set its value at the time of queuing  build. However, this feature was not available for VSTS Release and there was a user voice raised here requesting to allow setting release variables at the time of creating a release. As promised by MSFT, this feature is now available for VSTS Release. Let’s look at how to use it with VSTS web UI and with the VSTS REST API.