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Azure Self-Hosted Agent Installation

Creating a Personal Access Token

  1. Log into Azure DevOps.
  2. Under User settings select Personal access tokens
  3. Click New Token
  4. Fill the Name and Expiration fields.
  5. In scope select Custom defined, then click Show all scopes and tick Read & manageunder Agent Pools
  6. Click Create and make sure to securely store the token because it will not be accessible later.

Installing and configuring the agent

    • If you want the agent to be usable by different projects in your organization go to Organization Settings on your Azure Devops Organization page.
    • If you want the agent to be exclusive to a specific project, go to Project Settings on the Azure Devops Project page.

  2. Select Agent pools under the Pipelines section on the left

  3. Select an existing Agent Pool or create a new one.
  4. After you've selected an Agent Pool, click New Agent
    • Linux:
      • Select Linux
      • Press the Copy button next to the Download button to copy the URL.

Linux

In the Linux machine:

  1. Create a user for the Azure Agent: 
    sudo adduser azureagent
  2. Add the user to sudoers: 
    sudo usermod -aG sudo azureagent
  3. If needed add the user to other necessary groups like docker: 
    sudo usermod -aG docker azureagent
  4. Create any necessary working directories and grant ownership to the user: 
    sudo chown -R azureagent:azureagent /home/app/foo
  5. Switch to the azureagent user and navigate to the /home/azureagent directory: 
    su - azureagent
cd /home/azureagent
  6. Download the agent using the URL we copied earlier: 
    wget https://vstsagentpackage.azureedge.net/agent/3.220.2/vsts-agent-linux-x64-3.220.2.tar.gz
  7. Create a new directory for the agent and extract the tar.gz inside and confirm with ls: 
    mkdir agent
cd agent
tar zxf ../vsts-agent-linux-x64-3.220.2.tar.gz
ls
  8. Run the config script to start the agent configuration: 
    ./config.sh

  9. Provide the info requested by the script

    • Enter your Azure Devops server URL: 
      https://dev.azure.com/orgname
    • Press Enter to continue using PAT then paste the PAT we created earlier.
    • Enter the agent pool name and a name for the agent we're creating.
    • Press enter to use the default work folder (_work)

  10. Configure the agent to run as a service: 

    sudo ./svc.sh install azureagent
sudo ./svc.sh start

  11. Navigate to the Agent pools page on Azure Devops and select the relevant Agent Pool, then click on the Agents tab to verify that our new Agent is added as a self-hosted agent.