Azure Pipelines - Self hosted agent

Overview 📝

This documentation gives the details of steps to be followed for configuring self hosted agents for Azure pipelines.

Pre-requisite 🚧

• Already have Azure pipeline account / organization.
• WSL Ubuntu is installed in your windows machine or using Ubuntu out of the box to be used as self-hosted agent.

Setup Instructions 🚧

• Login to Azure devOps portal here
• Goto organization settings present on the bottom left.
• Goto pipelines –> Agent pools –> Click Default and New Agent.
• Click on the Linux tab from the options, as in my case I want to install the agent in my WSL Ubuntu system.
• Click on Download the agent, it will download (current version)

    vsts-agent-linux-x64-3.238.0.tar.gz
  

• Move the downloaded archive to /tmp folder, in my case it was downloaded under /mnt/h/downloads

    mkdir -p ~/tmp
    mv /mnt/h/downloads/vsts-agent-linux-x64-3.238.0.tar.gz ~/tmp
  

• Follow the instructions on the tab (under Linux)

     cd ~
     mkdir myagent && cd myagent
     tar zxvf ~/tmp/vsts-agent-linux-x64-3.238.0.tar.gz
  

• Create PAT token from your Azure pipeline Organization following the below screenshots.

  Don’t forget to keep the copy of PAT token somewhere securely in your system.

  

• Go back to the Ubuntu command line and run the configuration script.

  Once you run configuration it will prompt for PAT token and other details like Agent-name and Agent-pool etc, give any name but keep it default for other options.

    #Server URL: https://dev.azure.com/{your-organization}
    cd ~/myagent
    ./config.sh
  

• That’s it now you should see the agent under your Default Agent pool but in offline state.
• Now you can start the agent using the run script.

    cd ~/myagent
    ./run.sh
  

• That’s it now you have your own agent running, you can use this to build artifacts, in my case I wanted to build npm project, so installed npm

    sudo apt install npm
  

• Try building the project with Azure pipelines, with pool configured as default. example:

    trigger: 
    - main
  
    pool: 
    name: default
    stages:
    - stage: "Build_stage"
    jobs:
    - job: "Build"
        steps:
        - task: Npm@1
        inputs:
            command: 'install'
  

• Now try running the build manual using the run button of the pipeline and check the status of the build in your agent run session.
• Congratulations, you have configured your own self-hosted runner for builds.

  Resources 📚

• Azures Docs