Clear the work folder after each build?

[jsauvexamarin]

Agent version and platform

2.11.0


OS X 10.11.6

VSTS type and version

VisualStudio.com


devops-mobile.visualstudio.com

What's not working?

I'd like to know if there'a a way to clear the _work folder after each build. My MacInCloud build server only has 100GB of drive space. With the OS and all the dev tools, I'm at 40GB free. I burn through that 40GB by doing builds in under 24 hours. I run 8 VSTS agents on that machine, and the _work folder of each spawns around 8 subfolders over time. I have Build.Clean set to all in my build definition variables, but the _work folders still remain very full, filling up my disk in very little time.

Is there some way to command the agent to clear its work folder after each build?

[ericsciple]

it's not built-in today (it also prevents investigating the layout is required after the build finishes). a workaround would be to add an always-run task to delete the build directory at the end of your build

[jsauvexamarin]

Cool, thanks @ericsciple. @madhurig is also checking into something for me, but I think this may be the most simple answer. I don't want to give up the build parallelism I have with 8 agents, so deleting the build folder with a task instead of scaling back my number of agents sounds like its worthwhile.

[ericsciple]

@bryanmacfarlane @chrisrpatterson for consideration

my personal preference is don't add this as a feature. user can add always-run task to best-effort delete agent.builddirectory. i think if we do add it, then it needs to be a separate option to also cleanup at the end of the build, otherwise it seems like we would get complaints the other way - i.e. build failed yet files not left for investigation

[bryanmacfarlane]

Agreed with @ericsciple

[jsauvexamarin]

My final solution was to manually delete the source and build folders after the build completes by using the "Delete Files" utility task. The $(Agent.BuildDirectory) and $(Build.SourcesDirectory) variables were useful for this.

[vikingsunil]

In my case, the deletion of $(Agent.BuildDirectory) is failing as the folder seems to be in use. The error message is ##[error]Error: Failed rmRF: rm: could not remove directory (code EBUSY):
Did anyone else face this problem? Is there a ready made solution for this?

[TingluoHuang]

@vikingsunil do you have file opened within $(agent.builddirectory) when you try to delete the folder?

[Mardoxx]

A way for the agent to clear the work directory after build automatically would be very welcomed....

@vikingsunil I have the same issue..

[bergmeister]

@ericsciple This feature is really needed. As a user who wants to run the agent also on a cheap azure vm on the d drive, I do not want to add cleanup steps to all my builds just because of that. This needs to be a configuration of the agent itself.

[lijunle]

I don't understand the reason to reject this feature. A simple search in the Internet will get lots of similar questions/issues. This is a big gap between product feature and user requirements. Why not make an out-of-box option-in feature? Then, users do not need to write various error-prone scripts/tools.

[phil123456]

our prod frontend crashed becos of this, ...the factg that vstsagent on linux does not clear its internal guts, is just unbelievable and should be sonsidered as a design flaw if not a bug