Automate Visual Studio Team Services with PowerShell

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One of the main skills programmers have is the ability to automate the mundane. In my day to day job of both working on and with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) I find myself performing many of the same tasks over and over. And whenever these tasks require me to leave the comfort of my PowerShell prompt I get grumpy. Since I rather not be grump I created a project called PsVsts to help me automate those tasks.

PsVsts is a PowerShell module which provides several handy commandlets for working with VSTS. The point of this project is not to simply create a wrapper around the public REST apis but to lift those apis up a level to make them more convinient to use. Because of that many of commandlets consume multiple APIs.

The project currently contains the following commandlets:

  • Get-MyWorkItems Gets the work items that are assigned to or created by you. Provides easy way to filter by open vs finished items.
  • Get-WorkItems Gets the work items given a query.
  • Open-WorkItems Opens work items in your web browser.
  • Push-ToVsts
    Takes a local git repo, creates a corresponding repo in your VSTS project, adds that repo as a remote origin and pushes your local repo to it.
  • Submit-PullRequest Submits a pull request
  • Get-Builds Gets a list of builds
  • Set-VstsConfig Sets a config value for use in other PsVsts functions
  • Get-VstsConfig Gets the config values

The commands I use most often are the Get-MyWorkItems and Submit-PullRequest. The Submit-PullRequest commandlet wraps both the pull request and identity apis to allow me to easily create a PR and add reviewers using their name or email. I use this commandlet as part of function in my PowerShell profile to automate my common worflow to make changes and submit them for review:

 
function fastFix($branchName, $title) {
  
  if((-not $branchName) -or (-not $title)) {
    throw "You must specify branchName and title"
    return
  }
  
  Write-Host "Checking out $branchName"
  git checkout -b $branchName
  
  Write-Host "Adding all files and committing"
  git commit -am $title
  
  Write-Host "Pushing to server"
  git push -u origin $branchName
  
  Write-Host "Submit Pull Request"
  Submit-PullRequest -Title $title -Description $title -SourceBranch $branchName -TargetBranch master -Project MyProject -Account MyAccount -Repository MyRepo
  
}

I use the Get-MyWorkItems commandlet to quickly see what is assigned to me and then I can pipe that to Open-WorkItems to view them in the browser. By default this commandlet will try to show only open items.

 
Get-MyWorkitems -AssignedToMe | Open-WorkItems.

You can easily install these commandlets on your machine using the PsVsts Chocolatey package.

 
choco install psvsts

I hope these may be of help to any other PowerShell users who also loathe being grumpy :)

Source: MatthewManela.com