Azure DevOps Protect Main Branch Configuration Guide

Protecting your main branch in Azure DevOps is crucial to ensure the integrity and reliability of your codebase. This guide will walk you through the process of configuring protection for your main branch.

Azure DevOps provides a robust feature set to safeguard your main branch, including branch policies, permissions, and approvals. You can enforce policies such as requiring a build to pass before merging, or restricting direct push permissions to only allow merges from pull requests.

To get started, you'll need to navigate to your repository settings and create a new branch policy. This policy will dictate the rules and restrictions for your main branch. By enforcing these policies, you can prevent accidental or malicious changes from being merged into your main branch.

By following this guide, you'll be able to configure a robust protection mechanism for your main branch, ensuring the quality and stability of your codebase.

For another approach, see: Azure Devops Deleted Branches

To set branch policies for your Azure DevOps project, you must be a member of the Project Administrators security group or have repository-level Edit policies permissions. This is a crucial requirement to ensure you have the necessary permissions to configure branch policies.

A fresh viewpoint: Azure Devops Repo Permissions

You'll need to have Azure DevOps CLI installed and configured on your machine. If you want to use Azure DevOps CLI az repos policy commands to manage branch policies, follow the steps in Get started with Azure DevOps CLI.

Here are the specific permissions you need to set up branch policies:

These permissions will give you the necessary access to configure branch policies for your Azure DevOps project.

To configure protection settings for your main branch in Azure DevOps, start by navigating to the Branches section in the Repos menu. From there, select the main branch and click on the three vertical dots to access Branch Policies. This will allow you to configure the types of branch protection policies available in Azure DevOps.

You can configure branch protection policies at different levels, such as repository or branch level, and apply them to individual branches or patterns of branches. To protect feature branches, use branch patterns like refs/heads/feature/* to automatically apply policies to all feature branches.

Here's an interesting read: How to Rename Branch Name in Azure Devops

To set strict policies for long-lived branches like the main branch, you can require multiple reviewers, successful builds, linked work items, and passing status checks. This will help maintain the integrity of these critical branches.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind when configuring protection settings:

By following these best practices and configuring protection settings effectively, you can ensure that your main branch is well-protected and maintain the consistency and stability of your codebase.

You can require specific status checks to pass before a pull request can be merged. This is done by setting up the necessary status checks as part of your CI pipeline and configuring the branch policy to require these checks before merging.

To implement this policy, you'll need to set up the necessary status checks in your CI pipeline. This can include security scans or performance benchmarks.

Here's a step-by-step guide to requiring status checks to pass before merging:

A fresh viewpoint: Azure Dev Ops Status

1. Set up the necessary status checks in your CI pipeline.

2. Configure the branch policy to require these checks before merging.

For example, you might want to ensure that all security scans and performance checks pass before merging to the main branch. This can be achieved by setting up the necessary status checks in your CI pipeline and configuring the branch policy to require these checks.

Here's a simple table to illustrate the process:

In this example, both security scans and performance benchmarks are required to pass before merging. You can customize this table to fit your specific needs and requirements.

To maintain a clean and controlled codebase, Azure DevOps allows you to enforce specific merge strategies for your main branch. This ensures that all pull requests merge using a consistent strategy, preventing accidental or undesirable merge actions.

You can limit merge types to specific strategies, such as squash, rebase, or merge commit. For example, you can choose to only allow squash merges to maintain a cleaner commit history. Squash merging combines all commits from a branch into a single commit before merging into the target branch.

To enforce a merge strategy, select "Enforce a merge strategy" and pick an option to require that pull requests merge using that strategy. You can choose between no fast-forward merge and squash merge, which creates a single commit in the target branch with the changes from the source branch.

Here are some common merge strategies you can enforce:

Merge strategy enforcement is a crucial aspect of maintaining a consistent codebase. You can enforce a merge strategy by setting a required merge strategy for pull requests in the main branch of the Fabrikam repository to allow squash merge.

Azure DevOps provides a way to limit merge types, which helps to maintain a controlled and consistent codebase by restricting the types of merges that can be performed on a specific branch. This policy ensures that only certain types of merges, such as squash, rebase, or merge commit, are allowed, while other merge types are disallowed.

To enforce a merge strategy, you can use the Azure DevOps CLI command `az repos policy merge-strategy update` to update a merge strategy policy. This command allows you to update the policy ID, allow no fast-forward, allow rebase, allow rebase merge, allow squash, blocking, branch, branch-match-type, detect, enabled, org, project, repository-id, subscription, and use-squash-merge.

Here are the available merge types that can be allowed or disallowed:

You can configure the default organization, project, and subscription using the `az devops configure` command. This command allows you to set the default organization, project, and subscription for future use.

By enforcing a merge strategy, you can maintain a consistent branch history and ensure that pull requests are merged using a specific strategy. This can be done by selecting "Enforce a merge strategy" and picking an option to require that pull requests merge using that strategy.

If this caught your attention, see: Configure Pipeline in Azure Devops

You can push changes directly to branches with optional branch policies, as long as they have no required branch policies.

Having multiple branch policies, like the Require a minimum number of reviewers policy and the Automatically included reviewers policy, can be helpful in ensuring changes meet certain standards.

Both the Require a minimum number of reviewers policy and the Automatically included reviewers policy have options to Allow requestors to approve their own changes, but this setting only applies to that specific policy and doesn't affect the other policy.

To ensure that your main branch is protected, you can set up a reviewer and approval policy. This policy requires a minimum number of reviewers to approve a pull request before it can be merged.

You can require approval from a minimum number of reviewers, and the basic policy requires that a specified number of reviewers approve the code, with no rejections. The required number of reviewers can be set to 2 or more.

If any reviewer rejects the changes, the pull request can't complete unless you select Allow completion even if some reviewers vote to wait or reject. This policy is useful for enforcing code quality and accountability among team members.

If this caught your attention, see: Azure Devops Environment Approval

A required reviewer policy can also be set up to automatically add specific reviewers to pull requests based on certain criteria, such as code ownership or expertise. This ensures that the right people review the changes.

Here are some key parameters for setting up a required reviewer policy:

You can also update a work item linking policy for a repository or one or more branches using the az repos policy work-item-linking update command. This policy can be used to set up a minimum number of approvers required for a pull request.

For example, you can update the policy ID 3 for the main branch of the Fabrikam repository to be enabled but optional. This can be done using the default configuration az devops configure --defaults organization=https://dev.azure.com/fabrikamprime project="Fabrikam Fiber".

A unique perspective: Using Vscode for Azure Devops

Azure DevOps provides a robust set of protection features to safeguard your main branch. You can configure branch protection policies at different levels, such as repository or branch level, and apply them to individual branches or patterns of branches.

To protect your main branch, you can apply the same set of policies as you would to the main branch to feature branches, using branch patterns like refs/heads/feature/* to automatically apply policies to all feature branches.

You can also protect long-lived branches like main, develop, or release with strict policies, such as multiple required reviewers, successful builds, linked work items, and passing status checks.

To maintain a consistent branch history, you can enforce a merge strategy for PR completion by setting Limit merge types to On, which limits which merge types to allow in your repo.

Here are the allowed merge types:

By enforcing a merge strategy, you can maintain a controlled and consistent codebase by restricting the types of merges that can be performed on a specific branch. This policy ensures that only certain types of merges, such as squash, rebase, or merge commit, are allowed, while other merge types are disallowed.

Check this out: Azure Devops Resolve Merge Conflicts