Best practice for supporting small/personal projects/repos on Azure DevOps (on premises)

Question

I am setting up a on premises instance of Azure DevOps 2019 and have read over the guide for planning the organizational structure. In our situation, having a single organization and several projects and teams seems to be the most appropriate structure.

The question I have is in a situation where people have small utility programs they have written to help with their day to day tasks, where should I have them have place their code. In this situation, it may not pertain to a certain project and I feel like creating projects for every individual user that wants their own little playground to put code would be messy.

Is there a way I can have a project where users can have their own little area of repositories for their use and not see all other people's repositories in that project and therefore not look so cluttered?

Is there some better way to give users their own area to have repositories for their own use without cluttering up projects?

I would just have them use the cloud for miscellaneous stuff. Then users can manage it however they want. — David Browne - Microsoft, Jul 23 '20 at 15:12
I'm not sure what you mean by "the cloud". Are you saying to use anything they want that has high redundancy for storage? Unfortunately in our situation we cannot use any cloud based services. — Justin, Jul 23 '20 at 19:44
By "the cloud" I meant the Azure DevOps Services. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azure-devops-services/ — David Browne - Microsoft, Jul 23 '20 at 19:59
Ah, unfortunately we will not be able to use that at this time. — Justin, Jul 23 '20 at 20:22

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 24 '20 at 06:54

You can create a new project to place the repositories of the developers.

You change the repositories permission settings to achieve users can only view their own little area of repositories for their use and not see all other people's repositories in that project. See below:

1, Set the permission on All Repositories Level

Go to project settings of the project--> Repositories under Repos-->Permissions under All Repositories-->Search for the users in the search bar-->Change his permission to Not set or Deny

By denying this user's permission on the All repositories level, so that he willnot be able to see other people's repositories in that project

2, Set the permission on Single Repository Level

Go to project settings of the project--> Repositories under Repos-->Select the repository of this user-->Permissions tab-->Search for the user in the search box-->Set the permission to allow for the user his own repository(override the permission set on above All Repositories level).

By doing above two steps. Users will only be able to view their own repositories on the project portal.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 23 '20 at 15:08

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I agree common code or small utilities should reside separately apart from project code base. You can make a new project like CommonScripts or any name then the user can create a separate repository and maintain there own code or utility.

Advantage of doing that other person or multiple project can access that common piece of library in pipeline if required without doing code redundancy.

As an example in our organization we have project name called DevOps then we have separate repositories accordingly.

answered Jul 23 '20 at 15:08

Naveen Kumar

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Can the users that make their separate repositories also control the permissions on their repositories in those shared projects? – Justin Jul 23 '20 at 18:43
Yes one can control the permission related to repository as well as on project. – Naveen Kumar Jul 24 '20 at 04:13

Best practice for supporting small/personal projects/repos on Azure DevOps (on premises)

2 Answers2