/ado-pr-auto-comment

An easy way to automatically add comments to an Azure DevOps pull request

Primary LanguageTypeScript

PR Auto-Comment

An easy way to automatically add comments to an Azure DevOps pull request

More information about this extension on the Visual Studio Marketplace

Why would I use this?

Sometimes there are things a team would like developers to consider during a pull request. Putting these in the description can help but is easily overlooked or ignored.

By automatically adding comments to the PR, this puts the owner in control of acknowledging and responding to each item. If used with a branch policy that enforces comment resolution, it can also help enforce certain team policies that are difficult to automate

Here are some examples:

  • Have you tested this change in the dev environment?
  • Are there any feature flags associated with this change? If so, please confirm the change was tested with the flag both on and off and that the production flag is set to the correct starting value.
  • Does the documentation need to be updated due to this change?
  • etc...

Install the Task for Your Organization

  1. Install the PR Auto-Comment extension in your organization. More information here.

  2. Add the task into your pull request build:

    steps:
- task: pr-auto-comment@1
  inputs:
    comments: |
      Has this been tested in the dev environment?
      Does the documentation need to be updated due to this change?

    If you are using the System.AccessToken (default), be sure to set persistCredentials to true if it's not already:

    steps:
- checkout: self
  persistCredentials: true

    By default, text separated by a new line (\n) is treated as a separate comment. To use a different comment delimiter, set newCommentDelimiter:

    steps:
- task: pr-auto-comment@1
  inputs:
    newCommentDelimiter: "||"
    comments: |
      This is the first comment ||
      This is a second comment
      This is second line of the second comment ||
      This is a third comment

  3. Grant the build job user the Contribute to pull requests permission to allow it to add pull request comments. More information here.

  4. Now you're ready to automatically add comments! 💥

Task Options

Property Required Default Value Description
accessToken Yes $(System.AccessToken) The access token used to retrieve and update comments on the pull requests
comments Yes Comments, separated by newCommentDelimiter, that should be added to each PR.
newCommentDelimiter Yes \n (newline) New comment delimiter to differentiate between separate comments

Contribution

Found an issue or see something cool that's missing? Pull requests and issues are warmly accepted!