Grant or restrict access using permissions

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You can grant or restrict access to resources that you manage in Azure DevOps. You may want to open up or close down access to a select set of features and for a select set of users. While the built-in security groups provide a standard set of permission assignments, you may need additional security requirements not met by these assignments.

If you're new to administrating permissions and groups, review Get started with permissions, access, and security groupsto learn about permission states and inheritance.

In this article you learn how to do the following tasks:

  • Recommended method for granting and restricting permissions
  • Delegate tasks by assigning select permissions to specific roles
  • Restrict access to view or modify objects
  • Restrict modification of work items based on a user or group

Tip

Because you set many permissions at an object-level, such as repositories and area paths, how you structure your project determines the areas you can open up or close down.

For maintenance purposes, we recommend you use either the built-in security groups or custom security groups to manage permissions.

You can't change the permission settings for the Project Administrators group or the Project Collection Administrators group, which is by design. However, for all other groups, you can change the permissions.

If you manage a small number of users, then you may find changing individual permissions a valid option. However, custom security groups allow you to better track roles and permissions assigned to those roles.

Delegate tasks to specific roles

As an administrator or account owner, it's a good idea to delegate administrative tasks to those team members who lead or manage an area. Several of the main built-in roles that come with default permissions and role assignments are:

  • Readers
  • Contributors
  • Team Administrator (role)
  • Project Administrators
  • Project Collection Administrators

For a summary of permissions for the above roles, see Default permissions and access, or for the Project Collection Administrators, see Change project collection-level permissions.

To delegate tasks to other members within your organization, consider creating a custom security group and then granting permissions as indicated in the following table.

Role

Tasks to perform

Permissions to set to Allow

Development lead (Git)

Manage branch policies

Edit policies, Force push, and Manage permissions
See Set branch permissions.

Development lead (TFVC)

Manage repository and branches

Administer labels, Manage branch, and Manage permissions
See Set TFVC repository permissions.

Software architect (Git)

Manage repositories

Create repositories, Force push, and Manage permissions
See Set Git repository permissions

Team administrators

Add area paths for their team
Add shared queries for their team

Create child nodes, Delete this node, Edit this node See Create child nodes, modify work items under an area path
Contribute, Delete, Manage permissions (for a query folder), See Set query permissions.

Contributors

Add shared queries under a query folder, Contribute to dashboards

Contribute, Delete (for a query folder), See Set query permissions
View, Edit, and Manage dashboards, See Set dashboard permissions.

Project or product manager

Add area paths, iteration paths, and shared queries
Delete and restore work items, Move work items out of this project, Permanently delete work items

Edit project-level information, See Change project-level permissions.

Process template manager (Inheritance process model)

Work tracking customization

Administer process permissions, Create new projects, Create process, Delete field from account, Delete process, Delete project, Edit process
See Change project collection-level permissions.

Process template manager (Hosted XML process model)

Work tracking customization

Edit collection-level information, See Change project collection-level permissions.

Project management (On-premises XML process model)

Work tracking customization

Edit project-level information, See Change project-level permissions.

Permissions manager

Manage permissions for a project, account, or collection

For a project, Edit project-level information
For an account or collection, Edit instance-level (or collection-level) information
To understand the scope of these permissions, see Permission lookup guide. To request a change in permissions, See Request an increase in permission levels.

You can also grant permissions to manage permissions for the following objects:

Restrict access to view or modify objects

Azure DevOps is designed to enable all valid users to view all objects defined in the system. You can restrict access to resources by setting the permission state to Deny. You can set permissions for members that belong to a custom security group or for an individual user. To learn more about how to set these types of permissions, see Request an increase in permission levels.

Area to restrict

Permissions to set to Deny

View or contribute to a repository

View, Contribute
See Set Git repository permissions or Set TFVC repository permissions.

View, create, or modify work items within an area path

Edit work items in this node, View work items in this node
See Set permissions and access for work tracking, Modify work items under an area path.

View or update select build and release pipelines

Edit build pipeline, View build pipeline
Edit release pipeline, View release pipeline
You set these permissions at the object level. See Set build and release permissions.

Edit a dashboard

View dashboards
See Set dashboard permissions.

Restrict modification of work items or select fields

For examples that illustrate how to restrict modification of work items or select fields, see Sample rule scenarios.

Next steps

Remove user accounts