Private Go Modules in Azure Pipelines and Azure DevOps

Running a Go program in Azure Pipelines may lead to authorization issues when accessing private Go modules hosted in Azure DevOps repositories.

This can result in errors like:

main.go:12:2:
unrecognized import path "dev.azure.com/foo/bar/_git/baz":
reading https://dev.azure.com/foo/bar/_git/baz?go-get=1:
203 Non-Authoritative Information

Solution

To resolve this, the pipeline runner must have access to the repository to download the dependency. Add a .netrc file with the runner’s token by including the following step:

- bash: |
    echo "machine dev.azure.com" >> ~/.netrc
    echo "  login pipeline" >> ~/.netrc
    echo "  password $(System.AccessToken)" >> ~/.netrc
  displayName: Access private Go modules

Additionally, disable the setting in Project Settings -> Pipelines -> Settings -> Protect access to repositories in YAML pipelines to give the runner access to other repositories.