How to Clean-up Your Azure DevOps Build Agents

With a higher usage of our build agents in Azure DevOps, we run out of disk space twice in the same week. It was now time to find a solution that would declutter our local build agents.

The last time I searched for a solution I could not find anything that would allow me to clean up the working directory of a build agent without creating a solution by myself. Luckily, Microsoft listened to the countless complaints and created a solution directly in the build agent pool of Azure DevOps.

In the Organization Settings go to Agent pools and select your pool. On the pool you now find a Settings section where you can activate the maintenance jobs:

Activate the maintenance job option on the settings dialog of your build agent pool.

You can set how many days the unused working directories in your build agents are kept around and when your maintenance job should run:

Set how long the working directories should be kept around.

Once activated, the maintenance job will run on all agents and remove the no longer needed working directories.

This simple solution solved our disk space problems and saved us a lot of manual clean-up time. I highly recommend activating the maintenance jobs, even if you do not run out of disk space (yet).

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