I am looking for a way to create a service account to access the Azure Devops REST API.
The goal would be that this service account would be able to list all the projects.
For now the only solution I found was to create a new user, add it to an overall admin group and create a PAT for it.
Does anyone found another way of doing so ?
Thanks in advance
PS: we have a Azure Devops Service solution
Based on your description and concern, please note that the service account in Azure DevOps Service is automatically created for you when you create an organization in Azure DevOps Services. It is used when clients communicate with the hosted service and can be viewed through the web portal administration page.
And it is not supported to manually create service Account in Azure DevOps Service.
For more information, you could refer to the doc: Service account requirements - Azure DevOps | Microsoft Docs & Service accounts and dependencies - Azure DevOps Server | Microsoft Docs .
we have azure devops pipelines to build and deploy various projects.
Rccently, we wanted to use the "azureblog file copy" pipeline to copy some files to a blob storage.
This needs write access to the storage account over in azure.
Our administrator says that the pipeline runs as whoever manually runs the pipeline. If this is true, we would have to give all devs and users read/write access to the blog storage, which would be crazy.
I assume he is wrong, and that pipelines run as a specific designated user no matter how they were kicked off. The question is, how to find out what this user is for a given pipeine?
The "edit pipeline" has a security tab near the top, adn this lists a but of "Azure Devops groups", which are presumably groups who have the ability to run the pipelines.
But where is the pipeline user defined?
which user do Azure devops pipelines run as?
It depends on the context in which you are discussing the question.
If you mean inside a pure DevOps service, then I can tell you that the user that the pipeline runs on is not the one who triggers the pipeline (which is the case with native DevOps services by default, unless you install some weird extension or have a problem with the pipeline special design), but this identity:
<Project Name> Build Service Account
'run as someone' is just a property of pipeline run. Pipeline run as 'Build Service Account'(On the DevOps side), If you need a pipeline to download or upload an artifact, you can clearly feel this. If the account mentioned above has no permission, you can't do anything.
If you mean the user's operations based on the Azure side, then I can tell you that for native DevOps service, the 'user' that the pipeline performs operations on the Azure side is not the person who triggers the pipeline. The pipeline of DevOps service consists of multiple tasks, and tasks generally interact with other services through service connection (you can find this in Project settings).
There are many types of service connections. When interacting with services in Azure, this type is generally used:
Azure Resource Manager -> Service principal
When you create a service connection of this type on the DevOps side, Azure will also create an AAD app related to this service connection, and this ADD app corresponds to a service principal in Azure. In Azure, permissions are assigned based on service principals or users, and your DevOps pipeline's operations to Azure are based on this service principal and have nothing to do with anything else in DevOps. On the Azure side, this service principal can be considered as an Azure-side 'avatar' of the tasks of the DevOps pipeline.
If you are interacting with Azure through pure code/pure script, then please follow the logic of the script/code.
Our administrator says that the pipeline runs as whoever manually runs
the pipeline. If this is true, we would have to give all devs and
users read/write access to the blog storage, which would be crazy.
For native DevOps service, of course not. Unless this pipeline has a special design.
I believe the pipeline runs as the "agent". Who the "agent user" is will depend on, first, whether you've chosen a "Microsoft-hosted" or "self-hosted" agent to run your pipeline.
When running pipelines in Azure DevOps that are directly working with Azure Resources you need an Azure Resource Manager service connection. The credentials used to make the service connection are the credentials the pipeline will use when it runs.
You can have your administrator provide you with an Azure AD account that has the permissions you need and then use that Azure AD account to create the service connection for the pipeline. Once you have created the service connection you can use the ResourceID of that connection in place of you azureSubscription.
Here is the link to the Microsoft documentation on creating a service connection.
Here is the link to the Microsoft documentation on the Azure file copy task. To verify you can use the service connection in place of the azureSubscription.
I am trying to establish a Service Connection from Azure DevOps to my Azure B2C tenant and am running into issues. I'm starting to think it's not even possible.
I have multiple Service Connections to the primary Azure Subscription/Tenant, but specifically wanted a connection to my B2C Tenant, so that I can manage B2C resources using Terraform and the Pipeline Agent within Azure DevOps.
Does anyone know if this is even possible? Or a method of getting this setup? No documentation online has been helpful
How can I allow Azure DevOps Hosted Agent access my Amazon RDS PostgreSql without setting the Security Group to Anywhere. I was looking for IP Range or something to whitelist Azure DevOps Agents but can't find it.
In Azure, I can check a box to grant all "Azure DevOps Services" access to my Azure SQL Database but of course its not present in AWS.
I don't think we can access the Amazon RDS PostgreSql directly from Azure DevOps Hosted Agent, I mean using the hosted service account.
However, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Supports User Authentication with Kerberos and Microsoft Active Directory, so we can try writing script to access it by using the specific credential. Then run the scripts in pipeline by adding corresponding tasks (e.g AWS CLI or AWS PowerShell).
Also check How do I allow users to connect to Amazon RDS with IAM credentials?
For the IP ranges, please refer to Allowed address lists and network connections and Microsoft-hosted Agents for details.
The IPs used for the hosted Agent IP ranges are linked through here. I have not had much success using it for hosted agents. The list is big and the documentation is not really clear about what types of services you need to whitelist.
I would go with whitelisting the hosted agent IP just-in-time during the pipeline run, then remove it as a final step. First you can grab the ip of the hosted agent:
$hostedIPAddress = Invoke-RestMethod http://ipinfo.io/json | Select -exp ip
Then you could use the AWS CLI or AWS PowerShell module to add the specific IP. Azure DevOps AWS tools task includes the CLI.
Do the needed work against the DB, then make sure you clean up the rule\temp security group at the end.
I want to use Azure DevOps to deploy to my client's on-prem computer.
I have been looking at docs on build and release agents At first I thought that maybe it was a "self-hosted agent" but after reading further I thought it might be deployment groups. that I need. However deployment groups seem to be about VMs
in Azure DevOps portal ( dev.azure.com)
Organization Settings > Agent pools > Default
download the agent
make sure to use powershell not powershell ise