Is it possible to hide branches in Azure DevOps for specific users ?

Question

I've been looking around on forums and on DevOps, but I seem to be unable to find where I can remove reading permissions for a certain user on a specific branch.

Or how I can hide a branch from an user or group. Is this actually possible or am I looking for something that doesn't exist ?

Help or advice would be appreciated

Answer 1

That's not how Git works.

Branches are just pointers to commits, so you can't "hide" a branch, because there's nothing that isolates a "commit" to a "branch".

If the goal is just convenience ("I don't want Team Foo to have their branch list cluttered with what Team Bar is working on"), it's a matter of branch organization. You can organize branches into "folders" by convention: Team A puts branches under TeamA/: TeamA/featureX, TeamA/featureY, etc. And Team B can do the same thing: TeamB/z. In most Git GUIs (and the Azure DevOps UI), that will create a nice collapsible hierarchy.

If the goal is isolation ("I want to put things into the repo that I don't want some people to be able to access under some circumstances"), then branches are not an appropriate method of achieving that kind of isolation.