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Renovate on Azure DevOps: picking the right work item type

After our fix yesterday, we got our Renovate pipeline up-and-running. However the next hurdle showed up quickly. Right after the SSL certificate fix, I got the pipeline green, but the log showed this warning:

WARN: Azure: work item type does not exist in project (or the token lacks permission to it); skipping issue. The Dependency Dashboard needs a process that defines this work item type. Set one your project defines via the `azureWorkItemType` repo config option. (repository=Framework en Tooling/SOFACore)
       "workItemType": "Issue",
       "availableTypes": [
         "Bug",
         "Task",
         "Quality of Service Requirement",
         "Scenario",
         "Risk",
         "Code Review Request",
         "Code Review Response",
         "Feedback Request",
         "Feedback Response",
         "User Story",
         "Test Case",
         "Shared Steps",
         "Test Plan",
         "Test Suite",
         "Epic",
         "Feature",
         "Shared Parameter"
       ],

What's the Dependency Dashboard?

The Dependency Dashboard is a Renovate feature that opens (and keeps updated) a single issue in your repo, normally titled "Dependency Dashboard". It's not a PR, it's a living overview of everything Renovate is tracking: which updates are pending and why, PRs that are open or need rebasing, updates that errored out, and checkboxes to manually trigger specific updates on demand.

Azure DevOps doesn't have "issues" the way GitHub does, it has work items instead. So Renovate creates the dashboard as a work item, and by default tries to use the type Issue.

What's going on?

That type doesn't exist in every Azure DevOps process template. Our project runs a customized process, and Issue simply isn't one of the available types there. The log helpfully lists what is available: Bug, Task, User Story, Feature, Epic, and so on.

Renovate doesn't fail the pipeline over this. It just skips creating the dashboard issue and logs a warning. Easy to miss, easy to leave broken for weeks.

The fix

Renovate has a repo config option for exactly this: azureWorkItemType. You point it at a type your process actually defines.

I first tried to add it to the repository's renovate.json, but the pipeline didn't pick up the setting as expected. So I took a different approach and passed it as a CLI argument instead, via --azure-work-item-type:

trigger: none

pool:
  name: default

variables:
  NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS: 'd:\vlm-root.pem'

steps:
- task: RenovateMe@1
  inputs:
    renovateOptionsVersion: 'latest'
    renovateOptionsArgs: '--azure-work-item-type Task'
  env:
    RENOVATE_TOKEN: $(System.AccessToken)
    LOG_LEVEL: debug

Task exists in our process, so that's what I picked. Pick whatever fits your own workflow — Bug or Feature would work just as well if that matches how your team triages dependency updates.

Remark: the availableTypes list in the warning is our project's actual process definition. Renovate uses the Azure DevOps API to extract this data.

After this change, the warning is gone and the Dependency Dashboard work item shows up as a Task in the project.

 


That's it!

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