How to trigger your AzureDevOps Pipeline using GitHub Actions

For reasons beyond your control you may have a build or release pipeline inside ADO (AzureDevOps) that you want to trigger from GitHub. Turns out Azure have already released an action to do just that! You can find it here: @Azure/pipelines.

How to use the @Azure/pipelines action

First of all you will need to create a Personal Access Token (PAT) that has permission to trigger your ADO pipeline. You can do this by going to azure dev ops organization home page > open user settings > select Personal Access Tokens > click on Generate New Token > select the required permissions > click on Create. You will need to grant the token Release: Read, write, & execute and/or Build: Read & execute permission (depending on whether your pipeline triggers a build or a release). For detailed instructions on PATs and how to create one see the official documentation: Create a personal access token.

Once you have your PAT you need to add this to your GitHub repository secrets. To do this go to your GitHub repository > Settings > Secrets > Actions > Add a new secret. And enter the following:

• Name: ADO_PAT
• Secret: <paste your PAT here>

Then inside your GitHub workflow file you can use the action like this:

- name: Trigger ADO pipeline
  uses: Azure/pipelines@v1.2
  with:
    azure-devops-project-url: 'https://dev.azure.com/<org>/<project>' # Replace with your ADO project URL
    azure-pipeline-name: '<your ado pipeline name>' # Replace with your pipeline name
    azure-devops-token: '${{ secrets.ADO_PAT }}' # This is the PAT secret you created above
    azure-pipeline-variables: '{"accessLevel": "public", "<optional-pipeline-variable>": "<variable-value>"}' # These are optional

Simple right? You can find more information about the action here: @Azure/pipelines.