Configure agent demands

  • 5 minutes

Not all agents are the same. We've seen that they can be based on different operating systems, but they can also install different dependencies.

To describe it, every agent has a set of capabilities configured as name-value pairs. The capabilities such as machine name and operating system type that are automatically discovered are referred to as System capabilities. The ones that you define are called User-defined capabilities.

There's a tab for Capabilities on the Agent Pools page (at the Organization level) when you select an agent.

You can use it to see the available capabilities for an agent and to configure user capabilities.

Opening a configured self-hosted agent, you can see the capabilities on that tab:

Screenshot of the Capabilities tab. User and system capabilities are shown.

When you configure a build pipeline and the agent pool to use, you can specify specific demands that the agent must meet on the Options tab.

Screenshot of the Build job authorization and timeout settings.

In the build job image, the HasPaymentService is required in the collection of capabilities. And an exists condition, you can choose that a capability equals a specific value.

For more information, see Capabilities.