Skip to main content

Using Personal Access Tokens(PAT) to clone Azure DevOps Git Repositories

When working with Azure DevOps repositories, Personal Access Tokens (PATs) offer an alternative to traditional authentication. Although I would not recommend them for general usage, there are some scenario's where a PAT is a secure option providing security through scoped permissions, expiration dates, and the ability to revoke access without changing your primary credentials.

I had a situation where I needed to clone a set of GIT repositories and run a scan on each repository. As the script would be running for a long time I thought it would be better to create and use a PAT instead of my own account.

Creating a Personal Access Token (PAT)

  1. Sign in to your Azure DevOps organization
  2. Click on your profile icon in the top right corner
  3. Select "Personal access tokens"
  4. Click "+ New Token"
  5. Configure your token:
    • Give it a meaningful name
    • Set an expiration date
    • Select the organization
    • Under "Scopes," select "Code" with "Read" permissions (or "Read & write" if you need to push changes)
  6. Click "Create"
Important: Copy the token immediately and store it securely. You won't be able to see it again.

Cloning an Azure DevOps Git repo using a PAT

Depending if you are using Azure Devops Services (cloud) or Azure DevOps Server (on-prem) the approach is a little bit different:

Method 1: Azure DevOps Services (Cloud)

For Azure DevOps Services (the cloud-hosted version), you can embed the PAT directly in the clone URL:

git clone https://<PAT>@<organization>.visualstudio.com/<organization>/_git/<repository>

Method 2: Azure DevOps Server (On-Premises)

For Azure DevOps Server installations, the authentication method differs. You need to use the Authorization header with Base64-encoded credentials:

git -c http.extraheader='Authorization: Basic [base64_encoded_credentials]' clone https://<server>:<port>/tfs/<collection>/_git/<repository>

You need to encode the string "username:PAT" in Base64 format.

On Linux/Mac:

echo -n "username:your_pat_token" | base64

On Windows (PowerShell):

[Convert]::ToBase64String([Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes("username:your_pat_token"))

To avoid typing the header for every command, you can configure it in your repository git config:

# Set the extra header configuration

git config http.extraheader "Authorization: Basic [base64_credentials]"

More information

Use Personal Access Tokens - Azure DevOps | Microsoft Learn

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more