Automate GitHub Push to VSOnline

Question

Given a primary repo on GitHub (www.github.com/mycompany/myrepo) and a secondary repo in VSOnline (mycompany.visualstudio.com), I am looking for a way to automatically do the push to/pull from the secondary repo, when pushing to the primary.

The secodary repo is doing CI build and continuous deploy for us, triggered from a commit on the secondary repo.

In other words, I don't want to have to push to both repos manually from my client. What I really want is to push to the primary remote (GitHub) and have some automation setup up to push to/pull from the secondary (VSOnline), so that the CI build and CD build are triggered automatically.

Plenty of possible options that may solve this problem out there, but has anyone actually done it with any of them that pushes to/pulls from a VSOnline repo that we can learn from?

Obviously favor the solution with the minimal moving parts, configuration and maintenance.

Answer 1

Great question! One of the things we just announced this week is a new set of Visual Studio Online APIs that enable these types of scenarios. It was briefly announced in the keynote with a demo with User Voice, but we also showed integrations in more detail in Brian Harry's ALM Foundational Session (that you can watch online now).

In that session he actually showed GitHub being integrated with Visual Studio Online exactly like you have described through an integration with Zapier.