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Publish Build Tasks to TFS 2015 without configuring Basic Auth on the server

30 Jan, 2016
When you want to publish build tasks to a TFS 2015 server, you need a Basic Authentication enabled endpoint. Unless your server is configured with SSL, this is a major security concern. Until now the guidance I received was to setup a second Application Tier, configure it with Basic Auth and configure it to only accept traffic from localhost. The sole purpose of that machine is then to upload build tasks and later probably extensions to a TFS 2015 server.

Today I found a neat little trick that removes this need. Fiddler to the rescue!

Start Fiddler and enable it’s option to auto-authenticate:

Now open the command prompt and configure the proxy using an environment variable to instruct Node.js to use Fiddler as a proxy server, the default is port 8888:

C:>set http_proxy=https://xebia.com/blog:8888

Then configure your account in tfx and force it to use basic auth:

C:>tfx login –auth-type basic –service-url https://jessehouwing:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection

You’ll be prompted for a username and a password, it doesn’t really matter what you enter, fiddler will handle the authentication for you in the background:


As long as Fiddler is running and configured to handle auth, you can use tfx against your TFS 2015 server.

Jesse is a passionate trainer and coach, helping teams improve their productivity and quality all the while trying to keep work fun. He is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) through Scrum.org for the Professional Scrum Foundations (PSF), Professional Scrum Master (PSM) and Developer (PSD .NET) programs. With a strong background in the .NET platform and C#, Jesse is able to translate the needs of development teams when it comes to tools to manage work, build the code and keep quality up. He has contributed to a number of open source products that extend – as well as supported commercial tools like NDepend in their integration into – Team Foundation Server. Jesse regularly blogs and contributes to numerous communities on StackExchange and MSDN networks, he has received the Microsoft Community Contributor Award three years in a row and has been recently been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award. He’s spoken at conferences and user groups, including the Microsoft TechDays and the Scrum Day Europe. Trainer certifications: Professional Scrum Foundations Professional Scrum Master Professional Scrum Developer (.NET) Scaled Professional Scrum (SPS) Scaled Agile Program Consultant In past years Jesse has delivered ALM, Test Automation and Scrum training all over the world, most recently in Sydney, Milan and Bangalore. He has redelivered materials from industry leading partners as well as developed his own. In addition to the previously mentioned subjects Jesse has taught courses on Visual Studio, Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Design Patterns for C# developers, Unified Modelling languages and Regular Expressions. Jesse is married with Charlotte, recently became father of his first daughter and lives in a house that’s more than a century old in the beautiful city of Utrecht. He loves espresso and dark chocolate, travels a lot and takes photos everywhere he goes.

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