Azure DevOps: Requiring Pull Requests to be Associated with a Work Item

Whether following Git Flow, GitHub Flow, GitLab Flow or Trunk-based Development certain policies are standard to source code best practices. For example. each Pull Request (PR) must be associated with a single task/story/epic (a linked work item). This post discusses Azure DevOps support for this feature.

For a given ADO Git repo, branch policies (such a requiring a PR to be linked to a work item) are set per-branch. There is no way to assign such policies to multiple branches. In order to set a branch's policies, navigate to a Repo's branches tab:

For a branch whose policy is to be set, click on the three dots to show the context menu shown below: 

From the context menu, select Branch policies. From the Branch Policies tab click on Check for linked work items:

Under Check for linked work items, insure the Required radio button is selected:

Git Branch Strategies

Requiring "check for linked work items" is set per-branch. Which branches this will be set for depends on the git branch strategy adopted.

Git Branch Strategy: Git Flow

For the Git Flow branching strategy the following branches would require a linked work item:

• Main/Master
• Develop
• Feature
• Release
• Hotfix

Git Branch Strategy: GitHub Flow

For the GitHub Flow branching strategy the following branches would require a linked work item:

• Main/Master
• Feature

Git Branch Strategy: GitLab Flow

For the GitLab Flow branching strategy the following branches would require a linked work item:

• Main/Master
• Feature
• Pre-Production
• Production

Git Branch Strategy: Trunk-based Development

For the Trunk-based Development branching strategy the following branches would require a linked work item:

• Main/Master
• Trunk
• Feature

Azure/PowerShell: Geolocating Storage Account White Listed IP Addresses

On a project, we had provided access to to an Azure Storage account by adding permitted IP addresses to the firewall (white listed IPs). These settings can be found via https://portal.azure.com/ by navigating to the storage account and selecting Network under "Security + networking":

I was tasked with writing a script to list all the white listed IP addresses and display there geographic location. The http://ip-api.com returns (for free) the geo data associated with an IP address. This service is free for no-commercial use:

The PowerShell script to return this information takes two required parameters:

• $resourceGroupName: resource group name associated with storage account
• $storageAccountName: storage account name whose white listed IPs will be returned

The script in its entirety is as follows:

param(

    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]

    [string] $resourceGroupName,

    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]

    [string] $storageAccountName

)

Set-StrictMode -Version 3.0

$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop'

Set-PSDebug -Off

#Set-PSDebug -Trace 1

# FYI: Import-Module Az.Storage -ErrorAction Stop

[int] $exitCodeSuccess = 0

[int] $exitCodeError = 1

[int] $exitCode = $exitCodeSuccess

try {

    Connect-AzAccount -ErrorAction Stop | Out-Null

    [Microsoft.Azure.Commands.Management.Storage.Models.PSNetworkRuleSet] $networkRuleSet = 

        Get-AzStorageAccountNetworkRuleSet `

            -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `

            -Name $storageAccountName `

            -ErrorAction Stop

    [Microsoft.Azure.Commands.Management.Storage.Models.PSIpRule[]] $ipRules = 

        $networkRuleSet.IpRules

    $ipRules | ForEach-Object { 

        [string] $ip = $_.IPAddressOrRange

        [PSCustomObject] $response = Invoke-RestMethod `

                        -Uri "http://ip-api.com/json/$ip" `

                        -ErrorAction Stop

        Write-Output ( `

            "$ip, $($response.isp), $($response.city), " +

            "$($response.regionName), $($response.zip), " +

            "$($response.country)")

    } -ErrorAction Stop

}

catch {

  [System.Management.Automation.ErrorRecord] $errorRecord = $PSItem

  $exitCode = $exitCodeError

  Write-Host $errorRecord

  Write-Host "Exception Message: " + ` 

    $($errorRecord.Exception.Message)," +` 

    Stacktrace: $($errorRecord.Exception.StackTrace)"

}

return $exitCode

The Get-AzStorageAccountNetworkRuleSet cmdlet is described as follows (see Get-AzStorageAccountNetworkRuleSet):

IP Ranges versus Individual IP Addresses

The following $ipRules variable returns IP addresses and range of IP address:

[Microsoft.Azure.Commands.Management.Storage.Models.PSNetworkRuleSet] $networkRuleSet = 

        Get-AzStorageAccountNetworkRuleSet `

            -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `

            -Name $storageAccountName `

            -ErrorAction Stop

    [Microsoft.Azure.Commands.Management.Storage.Models.PSIpRule[]] $ipRules = 

        $networkRuleSet.IpRules

In the code sample above it is assumed $ipRules contains only IP addresses otherwise the following code where the http://ip-api.com/json service is invoked would not work as the expected parameter is an IP address not an IP address range:

        [string] $ip = $_.IPAddressOrRange

        [PSCustomObject] $response = Invoke-RestMethod `

                        -Uri "http://ip-api.com/json/$ip" `

                        -ErrorAction Stop