0

I have installed TFS 2018 and I'm trying to setup dedicated build server for this.

I have three windows servers one for TFS-WindowsBox1(TFS 2018 Installation completed), one for Build server-WindowsBox2(Build server setup steps and architecture needed), DB-WindowsBox3(DB Installation completed).

I'm looking for build server setup on WindowsBox2 and I'm looking best practices or steps to follow.

In administration section, I'm seeing agent download option in agent pools tab.

If i download and install agent on windowsbox2 server , will that be considered as Build server.

And what are the differences between agents and build server setup ?

san web
  • 43
  • 1
  • 6

2 Answers2

2

TFS has no concept of a "build server". If an agent is configured on a box and the agent is running, then that box can run builds (and releases, since the release agent is the same piece of software). That's all there is to it. Build agents are assigned to agent pools, which dictate the set of available agents.

In previous iterations of the build system (XAML build, TFS 2010 - TFS 2013, although it's configurable up to TFS 2018), you had to register build controller and assign build agents to the build controller. XAML build is deprecated and should not be used except in the cases of pre-existing legacy builds, so if you're not already using XAML build, you can safely ignore this paragraph.

Daniel Mann
  • 57,011
  • 13
  • 100
  • 120
  • Daniel, Thanks for immediate response. Could you please let me know the flow that i can implement, to make TFS fully up and running. My initial plan for the flow is as follows DB setup Completed-->TFS installed--> Install and setup the agent(installed but agent shows offline) --> providing access to teams(How do i provide access to teams to create collections) --> ask teams to create collections. – san web Apr 23 '18 at 21:34
  • @santhosh Refer to the documentation first. In most scenarios, you only need a single team project collection. In fact, common guidance is to keep everything within a single team project. There's a lot of guidance out there that you'll want to read and consider. – Daniel Mann Apr 24 '18 at 13:41
1

You can refer to this article (Deploy an agent on Windows) to setup TFS build/release agent, after that this is your "build server".

There are interactive and service mode and by default it is running in interactive mode, for this mode, you need to call run.cmd (in the same folder of config.cmd) to start agent, then the agent state will be online.

With service mode, you can check whether the corresponding service is running or not in Services.

starian chen-MSFT
  • 33,174
  • 2
  • 29
  • 53
  • @santhosh You can [accept it as answer](https://stackoverflow.com/help/someone-answers) (To mark an answer as accepted, click on the check mark beside the answer to toggle it from greyed out to filled in). – starian chen-MSFT Apr 26 '18 at 01:11
  • Done thanks for the help, I'm seeing one more issue with my TFS instance, while installing tfs i have chosen http and now i want to switch my TFS instance to https. I found a new cert that was created by itself on IIS manager bindings, i have applied new certificate to TFS to run on port 443 Now i'm seeing "https://" in red text and saying cert error. How do i resolve this issue any inputs on this ? – san web Apr 26 '18 at 17:49