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Auto detect configuration and git aliases

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Azure DevOps Services

The Azure DevOps CLI has been optimized to allow developers to use Azure Repos and work well with their git workflows.

Auto detect configuration

The Azure DevOps Extension evaluates if your current working directory is an Azure Repos git repository to auto detect configuration setting - organization, project, and repository. Auto detection is controlled by the --detect flag, which is true by default.

With this capability, you can run az repos pr list in your local git checkout to view all PRs in the repository.

Git alias

You can also configure the Azure DevOps Extension to add git aliases for common git-based Azure Repos commands like creating or adding reviewers to pull requests. Run the following command to enable git aliases.

az devops configure --use-git-aliases true

All az repos commands will now be aliased to git repo and all az repos pr commands to git pr.

For example, a pull request can now be created using the following command:

git pr create --target-branch {branch\_name}

Parameter hierarchy

There are three main ways by which parameters can be provided to a command. They have been listed in order of priority:

  1. Command parameters
    For example: az repos list --organization https://dev.azure.com/contoso --project webApplication
  2. Auto detection from git context if --detect is true. Detect is true by default.
  3. Default configuration For example: az devops configure --defaults organization=https://dev.azure.com/contoso project=webApplication

Say a customer runs the following commands

~/$ az devops configure --defaults organization=https://dev.azure.com/contoso project=webApp
~/$ az repos list --organization=https://dev.azure.com/contosoTest --project=testApplication

The organization and project parameter provided via command will be used since command parameters take top priority.

Let's have a look at another example. Say a user has pre-configured the default organization to contoso and project to webApp. However, the user is working out of a local checkout of a git repo, which is in the contosoTest organization and testApplication project. Further, --detect is true by default.

~/contosoTest/portal$ az devops configure --defaults organization=https://dev.azure.com/contoso project=webApp
~/contosoTest/portal$ az repos list

In this case, contosoTest and testApplication will be auto detected as the target organization and project from git context and will override the defaults that have been set.