Install machine runner 3.0 on Windows

Cloud

Server v4.4+

Prerequisites

To install machine runners and run jobs, you will need to have root access, and have the following dependencies installed on your system:

Desktop Experience
Remote Desktop Services (RDS)
The CircleCI CLI if you wish to install runners from the command line

Additional utilities and tools, such as Chocolatey, Git, and Gzip are automatically installed as part of the installation script.

Self-hosted runner terms agreement

1. Create namespace and resource class

2. Machine runner installation on Windows

Download the Install-CircleCIRunner.ps1 script from GitHub to an easily accessible location.
Open PowerShell as an administrator and navigate to the directory where you placed the script file.

Run the following in your PowerShell:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072;
./Install-CircleCIRunner.ps1

The installation will be output into your PowerShell interface.

As part of the installation, the configuration file for the machine runner (runner-agent-config.yaml) will open in Notepad. Fill in the requested information (see Machine Runner 3.0 Configuration Reference). The configuration file is located in the installation directory, C:\Program Files\CircleCI, by default.

After your setup completes, the machine runner starts automatically and begins looking for jobs to process.

Machine runner configuration example

Once you have installed configuration runner, select Continue in the CircleCI web app and you will be presented with an example configuration snippet showing a job configured to use your new self-hosted runner resource class.

The fields you must set for a specific job to run using your machine runners are:

machine: true
resource_class: <namespace>/<resource-class>

Simple example of how you could set up a job:

version: 2.1

workflows:
  build-workflow:
    jobs:
      - runner
jobs:
  runner:
    machine: true
    resource_class: <namespace>/<resource-class>
    steps:
      - run: echo "Hi I'm on Runners!"

The job will then execute using your self-hosted runner when you push the .circleci/config.yml to your VCS provider.

Uninstall / reinstall steps

Uninstalling machine runners will prepare the system for installation again.

Download the Uninstall-CircleCIRunner.ps1 script from GitHub to an easily accessible location.
Open PowerShell as an administrator and navigate to the directory where you placed the script file.
Run the following in your PowerShell:
```
./Uninstall-CircleCIRunner.ps1
```

Continuous mode vs. single task mode for Windows self-hosted runners

By default, Windows machine runners run in single-task mode in order to ensure high reliability of the underlying technology that the self-hosted runner uses to execute jobs. This is the recommended mode for Windows machine runners.

A Windows machine runner can be run in continuous mode. However, doing so eliminates the guarantee of a clean job environment. This may translate into jobs not executing as expected, and job failure.