Pull requests, branch policies and protection rules – DevOps on Azure and GitHub (AZ-400, lesson 8)

What you learn in this lesson

name the policies of Azure Repos and the protection rules and rulesets of GitHub side by side

classify required reviewers, minimum number, resetting approvals and self-approval

use build validation and status checks as a condition for merging

compare and restrict merge types (merge, squash, rebase)

add reviewers automatically per path (Automatically included reviewers, CODEOWNERS)

design a set of policies for the main branch with reasons and create it with az repos policy

The main branch of the booking portal of Nordlicht Reisen GmbH, a fictional travel agency, is still open so far: whoever has write access pushes directly. Last week a push broke the build, and nobody had seen the change. You are to protect the main branch so that every change goes through a pull request, is reviewed and built, and so that this works equally well in Azure Repos and on GitHub.

The exam calls this: designing the pull request flow with branch policies and branch protection rules and defining merge restrictions.

Prior knowledge: You know a pipeline for a repository from K3, lessons 3.7.1 and 3.7.2; there you also see how a build hangs on the pull request as a condition. Which branching strategy your team uses you decide in lesson 2.1; here you enforce it. Permissions and groups in detail follow in lesson 2.4 and in module D5.

The goal: a main branch that always builds

Microsoft's guide to the branching strategy says that the code in the main branch should pass tests, build cleanly and be current. For that it recommends a policy that requires three things: a pull request for changes (this prevents direct pushes), automatically added reviewers and a successful build. In addition, the pull request build should be fast so that it does not hold up the review. In Azure Repos the mechanism is called branch policies, on GitHub branch protection rules and, newer, rulesets.

Microsoft's page on branch policies says: A branch with required policies cannot be deleted, and all changes must go through pull requests.

This lesson belongs to course AZ-400

You will see the rest of this lesson and its video once you have bought the course. The goals above show what you learn here.

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