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Azure DevOps Server–Switch from HTTP to HTTPS–Part 2

With the release of Azure DevOps Server 2022, I thought it would be a good time to finally make the switch to HTTPS for our internal Azure DevOps server. With the idea to minimize downtime, I decided to first introduce the HTTPS endpoint before upgrading the Azure DevOps server. But o boy, what I thought would be an easy task turned out to be quite a journey.

Yesterday I explained the actions required on the server side, today we move on to the client side.

Visual Studio TFVC workspaces

In Visual Studio, we have to update our connections in Team Explorer.

  • Therefore click on the green Connect icon in Team Explorer.

  • Click on Manage Connections and Connect to a project…

  • Right click on the existing connection and choose Remove from the context menu.

  • Click on Add TFS server, enter the updated Server URL and click on Add.

  • Restart your Visual Studio instance.

After doing these steps, I noticed that still the original URL was shown when I reopened a project in Visual Studio:

There is one last step you need to take for your TFVC workspaces:

Remark: You need to repeat this command for every Visual Studio version you have installed on your dev machine.

GIT repositories

For our Git repositories, we need to update our remote origin. We can do this through the command line:

git remote set-url origin <remote-url>

You can verify that the remote’s URL was successfully changed by listing the remote connections:

git remote -v

You can also update the remote origin through Visual Studio:

  • From the Git menu, choose Manage Remotes.

  • Select the remote origin and click on Edit.

  • Update both URL’s and click on Save.

Important:

By default, projects that use Git for version control will fail to validate the SSL certificate you have configured for Azure DevOps Server.

This is because unlike Azure DevOps Server and Visual Studio, Git does not recognize the Windows certificate store. Instead, it uses OpenSSL for its certificate store. A solution is to register your certificate in OpenSSL, luckily an easier solution is available since Git for Windows 2.14. You can configure Git to use SChannel, the built-in Windows networking layer. This means that it will use the Windows certificate storage mechanism and you do not need to explicitly configure the curl CA storage mechanism.

Therefore execute the following command:

git config --global http.sslbackend schannel

More information:

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