[Docs] Azure Devops - Fetch Depth

[dazinator]

For Azure devops build pipelines created later than a certain date, they started doing shallow clone's and subsequently this means the following gitversion AzDO tasks fail.

   - task: gitversion/setup@0
      displayName: Install GitVersion
      inputs:
        versionSpec: '5.11.1'

    - task: gitversion/execute@0
      displayName: Determine Version
      inputs:      

There is a gitversion docs page for configuring the different build servers but nothing about this for azure devops that I could see.

The important piece of info is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/yaml-schema/steps-checkout?view=azure-pipelines#shallow-fetch

It basically boils down to this, you need to add an intial checkout task to your yaml pipeline to control checkout behaviour and explicit set fetch depth to 0 (which means it won't do shallow fetch).

 steps:     
    # this is rewquired for gitversion
    - checkout: self
      fetchDepth: 0
      clean: true 

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. After 30 days from now, it will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[github-actions]

This issue was closed because it has been stalled for 30 days with no activity. Thank you for your contributions

[asbjornu]

A pull request documenting this would be merged in an instant. 🙏🏼

[arturcic]

I think The AzureDevops task should point instead to https://github.com/GitTools/actions/tree/main/docs/examples/azure as there we have the examples and docs

[arturcic]

Closing in favor of #3937

[mc0re]

I get this problem even with fetchDepth: 0 setting. The problem occurs every time I start a pipeline run. When I re-run the job (Re-run failed tasks), it goes well.

    steps:
    - checkout: self
      clean: true
      fetchDepth: 0
      fetchTags: true
      submodules: recursive

[jzabroski]

I also have this problem @mc0re - did you find a solution? It seems like every couple of years, Microsoft VSTS/AzureDevOps finds a way to break this feature. It broke in 2018 and 2022, and now 2024.

[mc0re]

@jzabroski In my case the issue was in using on-site agents and not cleaning them. There's a file in .git directory that tells Git it's working in shallow mode. The file is created by later jobs, using shallow checkout. Delete it after the checkout step - and it works.
I'm afraid I can't recall the exact name of the file and I cannot look it up now, but it was obvious from the name.