Pills: Accessing your Git Repositories in Azure DevOps in Linux

When you need to access your Git Repositories hosted on Azure DevOps in Linux, you have basically two distinct options.

The first one is the classic ssh protocol, that is well know to everyone working with linux systems.

Figure 1: Choosing SSH as protocol to clone from Azure DevOps

This is the preferred way to access from linux system but sadly, Azure DevOps still not support Hardware Key based SSh keys, so you are limited to use standard RSA keys as you can see in Figure 2. Actually this is quite a limitation for those used to Yubikeys or Google Titan keys.

Figure 2: You can only use SSH keys based on RSA

If you do not want to use SSH and want to stick to the old good HTTPS protocol, you can use Git Credential Manager that allows you to authenticate against GitHub and Azure DevOps directly on a browser with OAUTH2. All you need to do is grab the correct release for your linux distribution from the Release page. In my situation I have Ubuntu based system so I choose a standard deb package.

Then you can install simply with two lines, a classic dpkg followed by a configuration for credential manager.

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sudo dpkg -i <path-to-package>
git-credential-manager configure

This is usually everything you need to do, then try a fetch against a repository in Azure DevOps or GitHub in HTTPS and a browser will open to have you login to the service. This is probably the easiest way to use Git against Azure DevOps and GitHub, but remember this is not to be used on a shared computer.

Actually if you are using GitHub and not Azure DevOps, I strongly suggests you to buy and hardware key and use it to create an ssh keys stored on your hardware key. Not only you will have more security, but performing an ssh operation is just type a pin and touch the key.

Gian Maria.