balena-azure-pipelines-agent

If you're looking for a way to quickly and easily add and manage self-hosted Azure Pipelines Agents to build aarch64 binaries whether they be running on a x86_64 host or even running on a Raspberry Pi or any aarch64-based hardware, you've come to the right place.

This project is a balenaCloud stack with the following services:

Azure Pipelines Agent

Getting Started

You can one-click-deploy this project to balena using the button below:

Manual Deployment

Alternatively, deployment can be carried out by manually creating a balenaCloud account and application, flashing a device, downloading the project and pushing it via either Git or the balena CLI.

Device Variables

Device Variables apply to all services within the application, and can be applied fleet-wide to apply to multiple devices. If you used the one-click-deploy method, the default environment variables will already be added for you to customize as needed.

Name	Example	Purpose
`AZP_URL`	`https://dev.azure.com/myorganization`	URL of the server
`AZP_TOKEN`	`<token>`	Specifies the personal access token created within the DevOps portal for your organization
`AZP_AGENT_NAME`	`Raspberry-Pi`	(optional) Indicates the name of the agent. If not specified uses the device's hostname.
`AZP_POOL`	`arm-pool`	(optional) Pool name that the agent will join. If not specified the device is added to the default pool.

For more information, visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/v2-linux?view=azure-devops

Installed Developer Tools

NodeJS (latest LTS)
dotnet Core (latest LTS)
python/python 3
go
PowerShell core

The Azure CLI is not currently part of this image due to issues building on aarch64 hardware (cloning and building results in a bad image, pip install azure-cli stalls on pynacl)

Fork, PR, or submit an issue if you'd like to see your dev tool added to this list.

Use case

Facilitates/speeds up devops with self-hosted arm/aarch64 Azure Pipeline Agents when targeting IoT hardware via QEMU emulation. With balena-azure-pipelines-agent it's easy to stand up a fleet of auto-updating agents that are able to build software targeted for arm/aarch64 hardware on hardware that's much more powerful than the target device. For instance, while a v8 build on a Raspberry Pi 3 might take days, a regularly sized vm or dedicated build machine running the Azure Pipeline Agent can chew through a build in a few minutes.

It's also possible to utilize balena-azure-pipelines-agent with Balena running on actual IoT arm/aarch64 devices for advanced scenarios where the hardware required isn't available through emulation - allowing a fleet of devices that are able to run generalized sets of tasks orchestrated through Azure Pipelines.