Question:
From PowerShell, how do I use Personal Access Tokens (PAT) to authenticate to my Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) account or on-premises Team Foundation Server (TFS)?
Answer:
As of July 2015, Visual Studio Online allows users to create Personal Access Tokens (PAT) as a more secure option than alternate credentials.
To authenticate to the REST APIs, all you need to do is use the PAT as the password portion in a Basic Auth HTTP Header along with your REST request.
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$personalAccessToken = "your-personal-access-token-here" $uri = "https://your-account.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/_apis/wit/workitems?api-version=1.0&ids=1,2,3,4" Invoke-RestMethod ` -Uri $uri ` -Headers @{Authorization = 'Basic ' + [Convert]::ToBase64String([Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes(":$($personalAccessToken)")) } |
Note, that the username portion of the Basic Auth header is completely ignored when you use a personal access token. You could have ("BLAHBLAH:$($personalAccessToken)")) instead and it will still work fine.