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Change project visibility to private

Azure DevOps Services

Important

Public projects in Azure DevOps are retired. Starting in 2027, existing public projects convert to private. For more information, see Public projects retirement and Migrate from a public project to GitHub.

Public projects in Azure DevOps are retired. You can no longer create new public projects or change a private project to public. If you have an existing public project, you can proactively convert it to private before the automatic conversion in 2027.

What changes when your project becomes private

When a public project converts to private, the following changes take effect immediately:

Area Change
Anonymous access Unauthenticated users can no longer view code, work items, wikis, pipelines, or artifacts.
Search engine indexing Your project no longer appears in search engine results. Existing public URLs return a sign-in prompt.
Public links Any shared links to code, work items, or build results require authentication.
Pipeline minutes Public projects receive unlimited Microsoft-hosted pipeline minutes. After conversion, your organization's pipeline capacity is limited to 1,800 free minutes per month (or your purchased amount).
Status badges Build status badges embedded in README files or external dashboards stop rendering for anonymous users.
Package feeds Consumers who restore packages from your Azure Artifacts feeds must authenticate. Public upstream access is removed.
Webhooks and integrations Consumers that rely on anonymous access might stop receiving events or stop working.

For more details about the retirement timeline and what to expect, see Public projects retirement.

Prerequisites

Requirement Details
Permissions Project Collection Administrator or Organization Owner

Convert your project to private

  1. Sign in to your organization (https://dev.azure.com/{yourorganization}).

  2. Go to your project and select Project settings.

  3. Select Overview.

  4. In the Visibility dropdown menu, choose Private.

  5. Select Save.

Note

After you convert a public project to private, you can't change it back to public. The option to set project visibility to public is permanently removed.

After conversion

After converting your project to private, verify the following areas:

  • Pipeline capacity: Check your organization's parallel job allocation to ensure you have enough capacity for private project builds.
  • External consumers: Notify any external users or tools that relied on anonymous access to your project.
  • Package feeds: Update documentation or instructions for package consumers who now need to authenticate.
  • Status badges: Update or remove build status badges in external documentation that no longer render.