Monday, October 23, 2017

Creating private git repos using Azure DevOps

GitHub's also offering free repos now! As it's the world's most popular development platform, I'd recommend using it instead of Azure DevOps.

GitHub is awesome. It dramatically changed how we share and contribute to open source sofware in the work. But, one of its limitations, especially for startups, companies or even tech professionals is that it doesn't allow private repos for free.

Fair enough, they are a company and need to pay for infrastructure, their employees and support all the amazing work that they do and all the traffic that they get. But since startups usually can't have upfront costs what's the alternative?

Introducing Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is a private (up to 5) service that has a bunch of cool stuff for developers and startups.


I'm a big fan of Visual Studio Team Services because:
  • as, this post explains, offers private git repos for free;
  • allows us to do view repos, code, pull requests/merges online;
  • automate Azure deployment;
  • run automated tests;
  • do continuous integration;
  • do relelease management;
  • have multi branches for your baseline;
  • install extensions;
  • host your private wiki;
  • and more, way more.

Creating your Repo

But back to the repos. Being free, once you register, you can create a new project like:
Azure DevOps - Creating a new private repo

Once your project is created, you should see your Git url from which you're able to pull privately using the credentials for the account you just created.

VSTS - Your Git Url

After your first push, you should see your files there. Other nice features already mentioned above, are available in the blue bar above and I plan to review them in the future.

Personal Git Repo

One thing that was not much explored is, the benefit developers and people who produce digital content in general is using VSTS to host your personal files. Instead of using GDrive, DropBox or OneDrive, why not host all your files there? Plus, you get all the benefits already provided by git and the cloud:
  • security
  • confidentiality
  • intergrity
  • version control
  • hosted on the cloud

So, you could store your portfolio, your projects, all those txt files that are never archived and always lost =) in git, access and modify them from multiple machines and let git manage it for you - for example, rejecting one modification because you are not up to date with the repo.

Conclusion

So there you have it. VSTS is a very friendly, powerful and free (up to 5 users) that you can use to host your personal and professional projects. Definitely it's worth trying.

GitHub's also offering free repos now! As it's the world's most popular development platform, I'd recommend using it instead of Azure DevOps.

References

See Also

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Bruno Hildenbrand