Do you know to connect to VSTS Git with Personal Access Tokens

When you create a new git repository and need to push it to VSTS you need to provide login credentials.

It isn't always clear how to do this.

❌ Figure: Bad Example - Alternate Authentication Credentials should not be used. When you change the password it invalidates all projects and can't be scoped to limit access to your Team Services data

Instead, you should use Personal Access Token. You can do this in two ways.

The first option is to make sure your Git for Windows is up-to-date and when cloning the repository, you use Microsoft Account to log in. Personal Access Token for Git will be created for you.

✅ Figure: Good Example - Windows for Git credential manager will automatically create Personal Access Token for Git

Option 2 is to manually create Personal Access Token and use it as a password for Git login.

You can follow this blog post for full instructions: Using Personal Access Tokens to access Visual Studio Online.

✅ Figure: Good Example - You can also manually enter Personal Access Token into password section if the credential manager doesn't work