Run a self-hosted agent behind a web proxy

Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2022 - Azure DevOps Server 2019

When your self-hosted agent requires a web proxy, you can inform the agent about the proxy during configuration. This allows your agent to connect to Azure Pipelines or TFS through the proxy. This in turn allows the agent to get sources and download artifacts. Finally, it passes the proxy details through to tasks which also need proxy settings in order to reach the web.

Azure Pipelines, TFS 2018 RTM and newer

(Applies to agent version 2.122 and newer.)

To enable the agent to run behind a web proxy, pass --proxyurl, --proxyusername and --proxypassword during agent configuration.

For example:

./config.cmd --proxyurl http://127.0.0.1:8888 --proxyusername "myuser" --proxypassword "mypass"

We store your proxy credential responsibly on each platform to prevent accidental leakage. On Linux, the credential is encrypted with a symmetric key based on the machine ID. On macOS, we use the Keychain. On Windows, we use the Credential Store.

Note

Agent version 122.0, which shipped with TFS 2018 RTM, has a known issue configuring as a service on Windows. Because the Windows Credential Store is per user, you must configure the agent using the same user the service is going to run as. For example, in order to configure the agent service run as mydomain\buildadmin, you must launch config.cmd as mydomain\buildadmin. You can do that by logging into the machine with that user or using Run as a different user in the Windows shell.

How the agent handles the proxy within a build or release job

The agent will talk to Azure DevOps/TFS service through the web proxy specified in the .proxy file.

Since the code for the Get Source task in builds and Download Artifact task in releases are also baked into the agent, those tasks will follow the agent proxy configuration from the .proxy file.

The agent exposes proxy configuration via environment variables for every task execution. Task authors need to use azure-pipelines-task-lib methods to retrieve proxy configuration and handle the proxy within their task.

Note that many tools do not automatically use the agent configured proxy settings. For example, tools such as curl and dotnet may require proxy environment variables such as http_proxy to also be set on the machine.

Specify proxy bypass URLs

Create a .proxybypass file in the agent's root directory that specifies regular expressions (in ECMAScript syntax) to match URLs that should bypass the proxy. For example:

github\.com
bitbucket\.com