One of the things that you need with a Continuous Integration server is that ability to build your software on some computer system and verify things work. With Visual Studio Team Services, using Visual Studio online, this seems to be a challenge.
The VSTS team has thought of this and includes the ability to target your builds on a hosted system in the VS cloud, where you don’t need anything installed. However the hosted build agents and servers have a limited amount of software that’s supported. SQL Server isn’t on that list.
However, there is another option. If you go to the control panel for your account, and click the Agent Pools tab, you’ll see something like this.
Notice the “Download agent” link. That’s what you want. As you can see, I’ve been testing and I have agents actually setup and registered on 4 machines. Here I’m going to add a fifth.
Once I download the file, I’ll extract it to see a list of files and folders.
What I first want to do is configure the agent, so I’ll enter ConfigureAgent from a command prompt. Note, I need to do this as an administrator level command prompt.
In my case there are some settings, but I’m overwriting them as I rebuilt my machine. Once I hit Enter, I then get the chance to Authenticate.
After this, the old Agent appears. However, since I’ve rebuilt and rename this machine, I’ll change it. I answer a few more questions about configuring the agent properties. At the end I’ll also authenticate to the Azure cloud once again.
Now that things are configured, I can run the agent. I could set this as a service, but I prefer to know the agent is (or isn’t running) and see the output. I have set this as a service before, and it works fine.
All I have left to do is RunAgent.cmd and I have an agent running locally that takes instructions from VSTS.
If I go back to my control panel, I see a new agent.
I can also trigger a build. I happen to have one setup for a project that points to local instances. Here’s the build definition, which uses the VSTS Extension from Redgate to build a database.
I can click “Queue Build” and a build will start.
I see the build running in the console:
And online in VSTS if I want. The Build Agent sends logs back to the VSTS service as it’s working.
This is a basic way to get a VSTS build working on your local machine with an agent. There is a lot more to configure if you need to, and if you need multiple agents, you can certainly pay for them with a different VSTS plan.
Filed under: Blog Tagged: DevOps, software development, syndicated, vsts