Installing Buildkite Agent on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Amazon Linux

The Buildkite Agent is supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and newer, CentOS 7 and newer, and Amazon Linux 2 and newer using our yum repository.

Installation

Firstly, add our yum repository for your architecture (run uname -m to find your system's arch). The default version of the agent is stable, but you can get the beta version by using unstable instead of stable in the following command, or the agent built from the main branch of the repository by using experimental instead of stable.

For 64-bit (x86_64):

sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[buildkite-agent]\nname = Buildkite Pty Ltd\nbaseurl = https://yum.buildkite.com/buildkite-agent/stable/x86_64/\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=0\npriority=1" > /etc/yum.repos.d/buildkite-agent.repo'

For 32-bit (i386):

sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[buildkite-agent]\nname = Buildkite Pty Ltd\nbaseurl = https://yum.buildkite.com/buildkite-agent/stable/i386/\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=0\npriority=1" > /etc/yum.repos.d/buildkite-agent.repo'

For ARM 64-bit (aarch64)):

sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[buildkite-agent]\nname = Buildkite Pty Ltd\nbaseurl = https://yum.buildkite.com/buildkite-agent/stable/aarch64/\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=0\npriority=1" > /etc/yum.repos.d/buildkite-agent.repo'

Then install the agent:

sudo yum -y install buildkite-agent

Configure your agent token:

sudo sed -i "s/xxx/INSERT-YOUR-AGENT-TOKEN-HERE/g" /etc/buildkite-agent/buildkite-agent.cfg

And then start the agent, and tail the logs:

sudo systemctl enable buildkite-agent && sudo systemctl start buildkite-agent
sudo tail -f /var/log/messages

SSH key configuration

SSH keys should be copied to (or generated into) /var/lib/buildkite-agent/.ssh/. For example, to generate a new private key which you can add to your source code host:

$ sudo su buildkite-agent
$ mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cd ~/.ssh
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "build@myorg.com"

See the Agent SSH keys documentation for more details.

File locations

  • Configuration: /etc/buildkite-agent/buildkite-agent.cfg
  • Agent Hooks: /etc/buildkite-agent/hooks/
  • Builds: /var/buildkite-agent/builds/
  • Logs, depending on your system:
    • journalctl -f -u buildkite-agent (systemd)
    • /var/log/buildkite-agent.log (older systems)
  • Agent user home: /var/lib/buildkite-agent/
  • SSH keys: /var/lib/buildkite-agent/.ssh/

Configuration

The configuration file is located at /etc/buildkite-agent/buildkite-agent.cfg. See the configuration documentation for an explanation of each configuration setting.

Which user the agent runs as

On RedHat, the Buildkite agent runs as user buildkite-agent.

Running multiple agents

You can run as many parallel agent workers on the one machine as you wish with the spawn configuration setting, or by passing the --spawn flag.

# Start 5 workers. Each one independently fetches and executes jobs.
spawn=5

Upgrading

sudo yum clean expire-cache && sudo yum update buildkite-agent