Create a project in Azure DevOps and TFS

Create a project from the web portal

To create a project, you must first have created an organization in Azure DevOps.

If you're not a member of the Project Collection Administrators Group, get added as one. To create projects you must have the Create new projects permission set to Allow.

1. Choose the Azure DevOps logo to open the Projects page, and then choose Create Project.

   

2. Enter information into the form provided. Provide a name for your project, and choose the visibility, initial source control type, work item process. For details on public projects, see Create a public project. If the Public option is grayed out, you need to change the policy.

   

   See choosing the right version control for your project and choose a process for guidance.

3. When your project has been created, the welcome page appears.

   

   Select one of the following tasks to get started:

   • Invite to begin adding others to your project. Note, you can only invite users who have already been added to your organization.
   • Boards to begin adding work items.
   • Repos to open Repos>Files page where you can clone or import a repository, or initialize a README file for your project summary page.
   • Pipelines to start defining a pipeline.
   • Test Plans to start defining test plans and test suites.
   • Manage your services to disable the visibility of one or more services.

1. Choose the Azure DevOps logo to open the Projects page, and then choose New Project.

   

2. Fill out the form provided. Provide a name for your new project, and choose the visibility, initial source control type, work item process. For details on public projects, see Create a public project. If the Public option is grayed out, you need to change the policy.

   

   See choosing the right version control for your project and choose a process for guidance.

3. Upon successful completion, the project summary displays. To learn more, see Share your project vision.

1. Choose the Azure DevOps logo to open the Projects page, and then choose New Project.

   

2. Fill out the form provided. Provide a name for your new project, select its initial source control type, select a process, and choose with whom to share the project.

   See choosing the right version control for your project and choose a process for guidance.

   

If you're using TFS 2015.2 or later version, then you can create a project from the web as well. It's important to note that for projects created from the web, Reporting and SharePoint integration steps are skipped when creating the project. You can still set up Reporting and SharePoint manually after project creation.

1. If you have TFS 2017.1 or a later version, choose the to open the Projects page, and then choose New Project.

   

   Otherwise, for TFS 2015.2 or TFS 2017, open the administration overview page by choosing the gear icon at the top of the page and choose Server settings. Then choose New project....

   

   Select the collection administration page for the collection you want to create the project in from the left pane, and choose Create a new project....

2. Enter information into the form provided. Provide a name for your new project, select its initial source control type, select a process, and choose with whom to share the project.

   See choosing the right version control for your project and choose a process for guidance.

   

Creating a project from the web portal isn't supported for TFS 2015 and earlier versions. Use Team Explorer to create a project.

Create a project in Team Explorer

You can create a project from Team Explorer after you have connected to an on-premises server.

1. If you're not a member of the Project Collection Administrators Group, get added as one. To create projects you must have the Create new projects permission set to Allow.

2. Ask your TFS administrator about the following resources and get additional permissions as needed:

   • Which project collection should you connect to when you create your project? If you installed TFS using the Basic Server Configuration Wizard, you have only one project collection named DefaultCollection. Unless you are supporting hundreds of projects, you should create all your projects within a single project collection. If you need to create additional collections, see Manage project collections.

   • Has SQL Server Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services been configured for the deployment? If so, ask your administrator to add you as a member of the Team Foundation Content Managers group on the server that hosts SQL Server Reporting Services. Without these permissions, you are unable to create a project.

   • Has a SharePoint Web application been configured for your deployment? If you want to configure a SharePoint portal when you create your project, ask the SharePoint administrator to give you Full Control permissions on the server that hosts SharePoint Products. Otherwise, you can skip this step and configure a portal at a later time.

3. Open the same version of Visual Studio as the version of TFS that you're connecting to. If you don't see the Team Explorer pane, open View>Team Explorer from the menu.

   As needed, Download and install Visual Studio Community to get a free copy of the latest version.

4. Connect to the server and project collection where you want to create your project.

   

   You can access Team Explorer for free by installing Visual Studio Community or any other Visual Studio version.

   You must connect from a client that is at the same version level as TFS. That is, you must connect to TFS 2015 from a version of Visual Studio 2015.

   

   Tip

   If you are running Team Explorer from a server that hosts SharePoint Products and SQL Server Reporting Services, you might need to run Visual Studio as an administrator.

5. If it's your first time connecting to TFS, you need to add TFS to the list of recognized servers.

   

6. Open the New Project Wizard.

   

7. Name the project. Don't specify more than 64 characters.

   

8. Choose a process template. For a comparison of the default process templates, see Choose a process.

   

9. Choose your version control, either Git distributed repositories or TFVC, one centralized repository.

   

   Not sure which system to use? Learn more about Git or TFVC.

   After you've created your project, you can add repositories.

10. Unless your project collection is configured to support a SharePoint project portal, you're done.

    

    If the Next button is active, you can configure your project portal.

    If the wizard encounters a problem, you receive an error message and a link to the project creation log. Review the log file for specific errors and exceptions.

11. When you're finished, you can see your project in Team Explorer. You can also choose the Web Access link to connect to your project from the web portal.

Create a project from the command line or scripts

You can create and retrieve projects and other objects from the command line or scripts using the CLI. Check out the CLI documentation to learn more.

Add a repository

From the admin context of the web portal, you can add additional repositories to a project, either Git (distributed) or TFVC (centralized). While you can create many Git repositories, you can only create a single TFVC repository for a project. Additional steps to address permissions may be required. See Use Git and TFVC repos in the same project.

Name the repository and choose Create.