Azdoutil is a CLI tool for Azure DevOps by Pluralsight author and MVP Benjamin Day. With azdoutil you can easily interact with Azure DevOps organization directly from your favorite command line environment. The project is published at GitHub under MIT license.
Getting started
To install this tool run a simple dotnet tool install azdoutil -g command. Note that you will need to have .NET 7.0 installed, so if you don’t have it yet, you can grab it from here https://dotnet.microsoft.com/
After installing azdoutil, we can run azdoutil command to view all the possible command options and there are lot of them. However before we can start using it more, we need to run one configuration command, which sets Azure DevOps organization URL and PAT for CLI.
azdoutil addconfig /pat:(your PAT) /url:(your ADO organization url)
After configuring we can make sure, that our configuration is working by invoking command
azdoutil getareas /teamproject:(your project name)
Commands and usability
This tool has a bit rare set of commands, that you don’t usually get from these kind of tools. For example, you can get throughputcycletime or create work items using Excel script. The tool is clearly aimed for more special cases, than just initializing a build or creating new release.
After using the tool for a while I noticed that it crashed a few times, so I think there is some work to do for better exception handling. For example, running command azdoutil forecastdurationforitemcount /teamproject:Example%20CI%20Build /numberofdays:30 /forecastitemcount:1, just made the app crash without any valid reason.
Summary
If you have special needs, that this tool can fulfill then go and install it. As a command line tool it is easy to use from Azure DevOps pipelines or GitHub Actions. I found the list of commands a little too special for my taste, but I will definitely keep this product under my radar and see how it develops.