What is Azure Artifacts?
Azure Artifacts is a package management service within Azure DevOps that enables creating, hosting, and sharing software packages. Teams can create private feeds for their packages and consume them in build pipelines.
The service supports all common package formats and offers upstream proxying to public registries like npmjs.com or nuget.org.
Core Features
- Support for NuGet, npm, Maven, Gradle, Python (PyPI), and Universal Packages
- Upstream sources for automatic caching of public packages
- Feed permissions based on Azure DevOps groups
- Retention policies for automatic cleanup of old versions
- Integration with Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions
- Views for package promotion (Development, Prerelease, Release)
Typical Use Cases
Sharing internal libraries: Teams can publish reusable components as packages and make them available organization-wide.
Deterministic builds: Through upstream caching, external packages are cached locally. Builds succeed even when the public registry is unreachable.
Controlled release process: Views enable promoting packages through different stages (Dev, QA, Prod) before they are used in production.
Benefits
- Unified package management for all technology stacks
- No separate infrastructure for package hosting required
- Fine-grained access control at feed level
- Automatic license detection for open-source packages
Frequently Asked Questions
How much storage is included in Azure Artifacts?
Each Azure DevOps organization receives 2 GB of free storage. Additional storage can be purchased in 1 GB increments.
Can I use Azure Artifacts with GitHub Actions?
Yes, Azure Artifacts feeds can be consumed in GitHub Actions workflows. Authentication is done via Personal Access Tokens or Service Connections.
What happens during upstream outages?
Packages are cached on first retrieval. If npmjs.com or nuget.org is unreachable, cached versions continue to be served.
How do I automatically delete old package versions?
Retention policies can be configured per feed. You can define how many versions per package should be kept or delete versions after a certain time.
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory supports you with Azure Artifacts: feed structure, CI/CD integration, migration from other package registries, and best practices.
