Securely retrieve your web frontend sourcemaps produced from an ADO pipeline

There's a really useful new feature in Microsoft Edge DevTools that works hand-in-hand with Azure DevOps.

You can read the full article about it here, but below is the short version.

 

When your project has some web frontend code, sourcemaps are very useful to debug the JavaScript code comfortably from the browser. Indeed, in most projects, the JavaScript code is compiled, bundled and minified for production, which makes it hard to debug. Sourcemaps allow you to map from the production code to the original code.

 

But many teams do not want to share their sourcemaps publicly on the web, because it contains the original code.

 

That's exactly what this new feature of Edge DevTools solves. It allows you to retrieve your sourcemaps from a secure location.

 

1. First step, you generate sourcemaps and index them with a SHA-256 hash. This can be done in your Azure DevOps build pipeline.

2. Second step, you publish these sourcemaps on the Azure Symbol server, where they can be stored securely (learn more).

3. Finally, using Microsoft Edge DevTools, you configure your ADO organization name and personal access token, and DevTools then automatically download the right sourcemaps for you (learn more)!

 

I hope this is helpful to people here. Let the team know about it by leaving feedback on their repo.