Microsoft Azure DevOps – Deleting and Recovering Projects

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Background: We have started discussing Azure DevOps. In last six articles of Azure DevOps we discussed

• Introductory part of Azure DevOps – Introduction of Azure DevOps
• Organizations in Azure DevOps – What are Azure DevOps Organizations, how to create Organizations, permissions etc.
• Microsoft Azure DevOps – Deleting and Recovering Organization
• Microsoft Azure DevOps – Projects – What are Azure DevOps Projects, how to create Projects, permissions etc.
• Microsoft Azure DevOps – Types of Projects – Public project, Private project
• Microsoft Azure DevOps – Project settings

In this article we will move ahead and will discuss deletion option for Microsoft Azure DevOps Projects and how to recover it.

Take away from this article: At the end of this article we will got to know about

• How to delete Microsoft Azure DevOps project
• Permissions required for deleting Microsoft DevOps project
• Recovering deleted project

Prerequisites :

• We must have an organization in Azure DevOps.
• User must be a member of the Project Collection Administrators group or an organization owner or “Delete team project” permission must be “Allowed“
• Delete team project permission set to Allow.

Projects are permanently deleted if not restored in 28 days

How to check if Delete team project permission set to Allow or not:

• We could check the “Delete team project” permission from project settings page – https://dev.azure.com/<organization name>/<project name>/_settings/projectOverview
• Navigate to “Project” for which we need to check the permissions
• From left pane at bottom side, click on “Project settings” link as

• Click on “Project settings” link, we will be redirected to “Project settings page – https://dev.azure.com/<organization name>/<project name>/_settings/projectOverview
• From “Project settings” page, from left pane click on “Permission” link as shown in below fig, we will be redirected to project permissions page – as https://dev.azure.com/<organization name>/<project name>/_settings/permissions

• On permissions page, there are two tabs – Groups and Users
• Navigate to Users tab, there we will have all the users who have project permissions
• Select the user for which we need to check the permissions as shown in above fig
• Once we clicked on user, we will be redirected to Permission properties as shown in below fig, under “Permissions” tab there will be all permissions and respective values

• We can update the respective values for respective permissions.

How to delete Azure DevOps Organization :

• We have two options available for deleting Azure DevOps projects.
  • From Project Settings page
  • From Organization settings page
• As discussed in previous articles, from Project Settings Overview page – https://dev.azure.com/<organization name>/<project name>/_settings – we could delete the project as shown in below fig

• From Organization settings page as =>
  • Go to Organization home page – https://dev.azure.com/<organization name>/

• Click on “Organization settings” link from left pane at bottom as shown in above Fig
• We will be redirected to Organization settings page – https://dev.azure.com/<organization name>/_settings/projects/ as
• From organization settings page, from left pane click on “Projects“

• As per rights we have our projects listings there. We could select individual projects and from right hand side we have “Delete” option.
• When we click on “Delete” either from any option we will have “Delete Project” prompt as

• To confirm delete project we need to enter our project name in text box “Type project name” as shown in above fig
• Once we have entered the project name, “Delete” button get enabled as

• On clicking on “Delete: button in “Delete project” dialog, project will be successfully deleted.
• We can verify this either from Organization setting page or Organization home page as

• We could view the recently deleted projects by clicking on link “View recently deleted projects” link present on Organization project settings page as shown in above Fig as

Recovering / Restoring deleted project :

• We can recover / restore deleted project by two ways :
  • From Web – This approach we will discuss now
  • REST API – We will discuss Azure DevOps REST APIs in upcoming articles
• Recovering / Restoring deleted project from the web :
  • From the Organization settings page >> Projects >> Recently deleted projects – we have “Restore Projects” option available as shown in below Fig

• We need to select the project form the deleted projects list and click on “Restore Projects” button on the right top corner as shown in above fig
• Once we clicked on “Restore Projects” button, project get restored, removed from “Deleted projects list“
• We could see the restored project again from project listing page from Organization settings page or from Organization home page as in below figures

References:

• Delete a project
• Restore a project

Next Article : We will discuss few Azure CLI commands for Organization and Project settings

We have very good series going on Azure DevOps. Please have a look once – https://knowledge-junction.in/?s=Azure+DevOps

Thanks for reading 🙂 Feel free to discuss / comment / questions. SHARING IS CARING 🙂

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