The Inevitables Tech Blog

  Author: Akhil M Anil || DevOps Engineer Getting the complete list of Repository names  in Azure DevOps Project using REST Api and Publishing as a CSV file. In the last blog I have talked about Authorizing REST API call using Job Access Tokens. If missed, please find that blog here:  Job Access Tokens . In this blog we will use Job Access Token to Authorize Rest API call and retrieve the list of repositories.  Full code can be found in GitHub:  Repository-List Steps: Push the developed pipeline code  (azure-pipelines-repos.yml) and python code  (repos.py) to Azure Repos. We are using  Repositories - List - REST API  to fetch the repository list using python. Job Authorization Scope for Job Access token. In order to access repositories using system access token, we need to change our default job authorization scope. In my last blog I have already mentioned about Job Authorization Scopes, feel free to take a look.  To set job a...

  Author: Akhil M Anil || DevOps Engineer For applications that interface with Azure DevOps Services, you must authenticate to gain access to resources like REST APIs. There are different ways to authenticate our applications with Azure DevOps Services. In this article we will use job access token/system access token (SYS_TOKEN) to authenticate into Azure DevOps. A job access token is a security token that is dynamically generated by Azure Pipelines for each job at run time. The agent on which the job is running uses the job access token in order to access these resources in Azure DevOps. It is fully possible to use System Access Tokens and eliminate the need for PATs in ADO pipeline for authorize the REST API calls to ADO. Furthermore, there is no need to save any credentials to files on disc and the System Access Tokens can be leveraged transiently as environment variables scoped to a specific job. The token's permissions are derived from job authorization scope the permis...

  Author: Akhil M Anil || DevOps Engineer For applications that interface with Azure DevOps Services, you must authenticate to gain access to resources like REST APIs. There are different ways to authenticate our applications with Azure DevOps Services. In this article we will use a personal access token (PAT) to authenticate into Azure DevOps. A personal access token contains your security credentials for Azure DevOps. A PAT identifies you, your accessible organizations, and scopes of access. As such, they're as critical as passwords. Since PAT is as identical as a user credential many organizations restrict its usage in Azure DevOps Api's instead promote the usage of any other authentication method or store the PAT token in Key-Vaults and use them. 1. Let's create a PAT token in ADO.  Sign into your organization From the home screen select the user settings and select Personal Access Token. Select +New Token. Give a name for the token, select the organization then set...

  Author: Akhil M Anil || DevOps Engineer Let's understand what variables in Azure DevOps are:  Variables give us a convenient way to get key bits of data into various parts of the pipeline. The most common use of variables is to define a value that we can then use in our pipeline. The value of a variable can change from run to run or job to job in your pipeline. Different types of variables are: User-defined variables System variables Environment variables User-defined Variables The variables defined by the user are called user-defined variables. In YAML pipelines, we can set variables at the root, stage, and job levels. We can use a variable group to make variables available across multiple pipelines or we can use templates to define variables that are used in multiple pipelines in one file. In this blog, we will discuss variables defined in a template file and create a simple pipeline for getting variables from the variable template.  Advantages of using Var...

Author: Akhil M Anil || DevOps Engineer An agent in  Azure DevOps is a computing infrastructure with installed agent software that runs a job to perform a task/ a set of tasks. There are different types of agents available for the users such as: Microsoft Hosted Agents Self-hosted Agents Scale Set Agents Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set Agents Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set agents is a feature within Azure DevOps. It allows you to use an existing Virtual Machine Scale Set to host your Azure DevOps agents and allows Azure DevOps to manage the scaling out and in of those agents. Therefore, you get the ability to deploy your agents in a private network and control the dependencies that are installed on the agents. Note: You cannot run Mac agents using scale sets. You can only run Windows or Linux agents this way. Scale set agents currently supports Ubuntu Linux, Windows Server/DataCenter 2016/2019, and Windows 10 client. In this article, we will configure the Linux Scale Set age...

Author: Akhil M Anil || DevOps Engineer An agent is computing infrastructure with installed agent software that runs job to perform a task/ a set of tasks. There are different types of agents available for the users such as: Microsoft Hosted Agents Self-hosted Agents Scale Set Agents Self-hosted Agents An agent that we set up and manage on our own to run jobs is a  self-hosted agent .  Self-hosted agents give us more control to install dependent software needed for our builds and deployments. Also, machine-level caches and configuration persist from run to run, which can boost speed. We  can install the agent on Linux, macOS, or Windows machines. We can also install an agent on a Docker container. This Article covers configuring an agent on a Docker container and use the agent to run job to perform tasks. Run a self-hosted agent in Docker We can set up a self-hosted agent in Azure Pipelines to run inside a Windows Server Core (for Windows hosts), or Ubuntu container (for...

  Author: Akhil M Anil || DevOps Engineer Getting the complete list of Repository names  in Azure DevOps Project using REST Api and Publishing as a CSV file Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs are service endpoints that support sets of HTTP operations (methods), which provide create, retrieve, update, or delete access to the service's resources. This article covers creating a REST API call pipeline in Azure DevOps to access the Repos and retrieve the list of all Repositories created and publish the list as a csv file. Full code can be found in GitHub:  Azure-DevOps/Repos-List Nb: For authenticating to ADO, we are using PAT token. Ref:  Use personal access tokens - Azure DevOps | Microsoft Learn   Steps: Push the developed pipeline (azure-pipelines-repos.yml) code and python (repos.py) code to Azure Repos. If you have an existing PAT token use the PAT and make sure the PAT token has access to list the Repository list, if not create a PAT token and use th...