13 Aug 2020 • on devops

Deployment Group provision in Azure Dev Ops (On Premise)

We are a long time users of Team Foundation Server (TFS). As you may know recently it’s been renamed into Azure Dev Ops. I absolutely love the new “Dev Ops” version (we are running v. 17.M153.5 by the way).

But we faced two issues with it, so I’d like to document these here.

1. Build Agent registration

If you need to register Build Agent, you have to include Project Collection Name into the url.

For example previously it worked fine if you specify https://tfs.example.com/tfs/.

But with Azure Dev Ops you have to include https://tfs.example.com/tfs/FooBar/ (FooBar is a collection name here).

Otherwise you will get Client authentication required error.

2. Deployment Agent regionstration

If you need to register agent into Deployment Group, you need to modify the PowerShell script a bit. In particular you have to add --unattended --token {PAT_TOKEN_HERE}

So instead of the command below which is part of the Registration script in Dev Ops “Deployment Group” screen.

.\config.cmd --deploymentpool --deploymentpoolname "DEV" --agent $env:COMPUTERNAME --runasservice --work '_work' --url 'https://tfs.example.com/tfs/'

it should be something like this

.\config.cmd --deploymentpool --deploymentpoolname "DEV" --agent $env:COMPUTERNAME --runasservice --work '_work' --url 'https://tfs.example.com/tfs/' --unattended --token {PAT_TOKEN_HERE}

Otherwise you will be asked to provide url to DevOps again and then get Not Found error if you try to include Collection Name into Url.

As I understand the second issue related to the same root case as a first one - without --unattanded flag it was complaining about the https://tfs.example.com/tfs/ url. Then I included Collection Name in the url it was showing “Not Found” error because collection name appeared twice:

https://tfs.example.com/tfs/{COLLECTION_NAME}/{COLLECTION_NAME}/_apis/connectionData?connectOptions=1&lastChangeId=-1&lastChangeId64=-1 failed. HTTP Status: NotFound