Set up bash inside self-hosted Windows agents in Azure DevOps

1
votes

Microsoft's own documentation provides the links to the images used for various operating systems, on top of which Microsoft-hosted agents get created.

For Windows Server 2019, the link shows bash as one of the tools included, and it also mentions WSL1 (Windows Subsystem for Linux v1) as installed. And it works just as expected, with Bash tasks running just fine inside Azure DevOps pipelines.

We're currently in the process of setting up our own self-hosted Windows agents, and we're looking for this capability as well. But to my knowledge, having Linux tools such as bash working on Windows requires 1) WSL installed and 2) a Linux distribution installed per a specific user. The procedure for deploying on Windows Server is here.

WSL doesn't currently have multiple-user support (GitHub issue here) and trying to run Linux tools as LOCAL SYSTEM presents challenges of their own. So in this context, how does the image used by the Microsoft-hosted Azure DevOps agents allow them to seamlessly run bash?

I heard about Cygwin, and know that it can provide similar functionality, but for now I'm trying to get bash configured similar to how it's done on Microsoft's own hosted agents.

1
azure-devopsazure-pipelines

1 Answers

0
votes

As of this time, however, I think it is not supported running bash in Azure DevOps self-hosted Windows agent.

The Bash task runs on the agent as the user "NT Authority \ Network Service". However, we cannot install Linux distribution for this user. It will show that the user haven't logged in.

But for Microsoft, its virtual machines should have a specific user from whom bash starts rather than the default NT Authority \ Network Service.