Replacing Zapier With Azure Function

I just blogged about that I used Zapier to trigger VSTS build, which works well. And I love it, except

• It seems to ask for too many permissions (both on VSTS/GitHub sides).
• Such permissions are granted for a very long time (not a one time setup).
• Its free plan of course has limitation.

I still remembered that when I attempted to abort VSTS build, I read about how to call VSTS REST API in C#.

In fact, the first revision of that abort tool was in C#.

With the same snippet, I can easily trigger a build from code by sending a suitable POST request.

All I need is just the URL path and a one-time Personal Access Token.

So what if I write a tool myself to trigger the build? Where should I host it? In what form?

Luckily I was evaluating Azure Function recently, and I did know I can easily paste just a small code snippet and run it.

The only missing part was to let GitHub push talk to this Azure Function, and well Google took me directly to the spot.

Easy? Time to put them all together.

1. Follow Microsoft’s sample to create the Azure Function on Azure. Once finished, you have a URL and a secret.
2. Go to the GitHub repos you want to track, and add a web hook in them with the info you got in step 1.
3. Modify the Azure Function, and use the following code snippet to trigger a build.

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Net.Http.Headers;
using System.Text;

public static async Task<HttpResponseMessage> Run(HttpRequestMessage req, TraceWriter log)
{
    log.Info("C# HTTP trigger function processed a request.");
    // Get request body
    dynamic data = await req.Content.ReadAsAsync<object>();
    // Extract github comment from request body
    string gitHubComment = data?.comment?.body;
    var pat = "xxxxxxxxx";
    // trigger a new build.
    using (var client = new HttpClient())
    {
        client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Accept.Clear();
        client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Accept.Add(new MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("application/json"));
        client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Basic",
            Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(string.Format("{0}:{1}", "", pat))));
        var url = $"https://xxxx.visualstudio.com/xxxx/_apis/build/builds?api-version=4.1";
        Console.WriteLine(url);
        using (HttpResponseMessage response = await client.PostAsync(
            url,
            new StringContent(
            "{ \"definition\": {\"id\": 2}, \"reason\": \"manual\" }",
            Encoding.UTF8,
            "application/json")))
        {
            response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
            string responseBody = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
            Console.WriteLine(responseBody);
        }
    }

    return req.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, "From Github:" + gitHubComment);
}

It is so obvious what the code does, so I won’t explain further.

Note that the personal access token has a life span (one year max), so I do need to replace it later with another one.

Then I went on to remove all my Zaps from Zapier and also disconnected all linked accounts. I might use Zapier next time for something else, but right now Azure Function serves me reliably.

Stay tuned.