Is it possible to install multiple remote agents for Atlassian Bamboo on a single computer?

Question

Our company produces cross-platform software and we have Bamboo instance which is building projects under various incompatible environments (linux, win, os x). There's a VM configured for building under each environment. So is it possible to run several remote agents on each VM to perform concurrent builds of different projects ?

Phina

Answer 1

Yes it is possible to run multiple remote agents on both windows and linux based hosts. I currently manage the remote agents for the linux hosts so I can't comment on the windows service remote agents.

I implemented the multiple remote agents buy first creating a folder for each agent, then on installation of each agent you specify the location for the bamboo.home of each agent.

On the bamboo master server you can rename the remote agent so you can tell the difference between the agent that is running you build job.

Orman

Answer 2

Yes, that is possible. See the "Changing where the remote agent stores its data" section of the Bamboo Remote Agent Installation guide.

To make this work, for each remote agent you run on the same machine you will need to specify a different location defined for the agent to store its data (otherwise builds will fail trying to write to the same location).

Contexture

Bamboo server does not distinguish agents on one machine - so it's not possible to run two agents at a time. That's the answer I received from local Atlassian dealer. So we need to provide a separate virtual machine for each agent. – Phina

Answer 3

I can't comment on linux, but on Windows, yes you can.

If you change the Windows service name from the default 'Bamboo Remote Agent' to something like 'Bamboo Remote Agent 1', 'Bamboo Remote Agent 2' by:

1. uninstalling with the bin/uninstall-ntservcice
2. editing conf/wrapper.conf to change the service name and display name
3. reinstalling with the bin/install-nt-service

After doing this you should be able to run multiple agents fine.

Coquito

Answer 4

I was able to create two agents on the same server. In this case I actually want the same bamboo-home set so that either agent can build to the same location ... just when some of my builds take longer, I have a second agent sitting around for the quicker builds that get queued up otherwise. In the bamboo-agent.sh, I changed:

APP_NAME, APP_LONG_NAME, and REAL_DIR

I didn't change anything in conf/wrapper.conf. And in the GUI I updated the name of the agents by clicking "Edit Details" on the agent capability page.

Just in case, I also made the agentUuid tag in bamboo-agent.cfg.xml empty thinking it would get overwritten when I started the agent. I didn't want to agents starting with the same Uuid even though I couldn't tell what this field was already used for.

As far as I can tell this worked as I expected. I could see two agents from the GUI and kicked off two builds simultaneously. FWIW, what I don't know if this is considered a hacked way of doing this or not.

Oedipus