Question: Example of adding additional tools to agent VM image?

[mfaulcon]

By any chance, is there a working example of how to add additional tools to the agent VM image prior to adding it to the gallery? We need to add a few non-standard tools to the toolset to support our builds, and while I have a working pipeline to automatically build and deploy images to the gallery, I have not been successful in figuring out how to add the additional tools.

[YannickRe]

I do not have any working examples nor guidance, as I have never done this on my end.
I'll leave it open for others to respond and share, otherwise: if you figure it out, I'd be very grateful if you'd write it down and share it with us.

[Tjeerd-menno]

Not a real example but this is how you can do exactly that.

1. Fork the https://github.com/actions/runner-images repository
2. Add a dedicated Install-XXX.ps1 and/or Install-XXX.sh script to the "images/<OS_Type>/scripts/build" folder which performs the install of the tool.
3. Add a call to the newly added script to the relevant Packer template files (*.pkr.hcl) in the "templates" folder.

When writing your install script, you can use the helper functions under "images/<OS_Type>/scripts/helpers". The existing scripts for the various tools (each tool has a dedicated script) provide loads of examples.

If you don't want to use a fork and keep the pipeline running based on the original Git repository you could simply copy the install script into the "images/<OS_Type>/scripts/build" folder and inject the extra call to the script in the template after the repository clone task in the pipeline template in this repository (buildagent-generation-template.yml)