Machine runner installation on Windows

Cloud

Server v4.x

Server v3.x

This page is a continuation of installing self-hosted runners. You will need to have an existing CircleCI namespace and resource class to continue below. You can do this on the CircleCI web app by navigating to Self-Hosted Runners (see the documentation for the Web app installation). You can also use the CLI.

The page below walks you through installing a machine runner and its dependencies (for example, Chocolatey, Git, and Gzip) on your Windows Server.

Since this setup creates a new local administrator user that runs CircleCI jobs, your Windows Server needs to be capable of creating local users and accepting remote logons for them.

The Windows Server needs to be a domain member when you set this up in domain environments. The self-hosted runner instance cannot run on a Windows Server operating as a domain controller.

Installation steps

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 (launch-agent-config.yaml) will open in Notepad. Please fill the file out with the requested information (see Self-hosted Runner Configuration Reference). The configuration file is located in the installation directory, C:\Program Files\CircleCI, by default.

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

Machine runner configuration example

The fields you must set for a specific job to run using your self-hosted 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!"

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 reliablity 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 failing.

Troubleshooting

Refer to the Troubleshoot Machine Runner section of the Troubleshoot Self-hosted Runner guide if you encounter issues installing or running machine runner on Windows.

Help make this document better

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