Setting up a Private VSTS Build Agent

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In this exercise, you are going to configure a private build agent that runs in a Docker container.

This exercise assumes you have completed the exercise to create a Team Project. This exercise uses a team project named jdev-labs, though your team project name may differ.

Note: It is not necessary to run the VSTS agent in a container - but it is convenient to do so and means that you don’t have to install any other prerequisites on the machine running the container, since all the prerequisites are inside the container.

Starting a VSTS Agent Container using Docker

In this task you will start a VSTS build agent container using Docker. This container will be used to run builds and releases.

On your VM, open a terminal by clicking on the Terminal Emulator icon in the toolbar.
Enter the following command:
```
 docker run -e VSTS_ACCOUNT=<account> -e VSTS_TOKEN=<pat> -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock --name vstsagent -it vsts/agent
```
where:
- account is your VSTS account name (the bit before .visualstudio.com)
- pat is your PAT
You should see a message indicating Listening for Jobs:

Note: This starts a docker container (called vstsagent) that has a VSTS agent running inside it. The agent is connected to your VSTS account and has also mounted the VM Docker socket so that the container can perform Docker operations (like building containers). It is created from a Dockerfile (listed below) that installs PhantomJS for running headless Selenium tests and configures Docker certs and environment variables. You can move this terminal to the side since the container is running interactively, so the prompt you are seeing is actually inside the container. Open a new terminal by clicking on the Terminal Emulator icon in the toolbar
```
 # Dockerfile for custom vsts agent image with phantomjd and docker config
 FROM microsoft/vsts-agent

 # install phantomjs
 RUN curl -L https://bitbucket.org/ariya/phantomjs/downloads/$PHANTOM.tar.bz2 > $PHANTOM.tar.bz2 && \
 tar xvjf $PHANTOM.tar.bz2 -C /usr/local/share && \
 ln -sf /usr/local/share/$PHANTOM/bin/phantomjs /usr/local/share/phantomjs && \
 ln -sf /usr/local/share/$PHANTOM/bin/phantomjs /usr/local/bin/phantomjs && \
 ln -sf /usr/local/share/$PHANTOM/bin/phantomjs /usr/bin/phantomjs
 RUN apt-get update && apt-get install libfontconfig -y

 # configure docker
 COPY .docker /root/.docker/
 ENV DOCKER_HOST=tcp://$HOSTNAME:2376 DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY=1
```
$HOSTNAME is a variable that resolves in the setup script that executed when you set up your Azure VM.
If your container stops running for some reason, you can run the following commands to restart and attach to it:
```
 docker start vstsagent
 docker attach vstsagent
```

Starting a VSTS Agent Container using Docker

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