Running Jenkins agent as a service on Windows

Objective

Run Jenkins agent.jar file in a Windows service. It's not possible to simply register a service with the exact command as a Windows Service requires a special binary.

I'll be using WinSW for this.

Configuration

Install the same major version of Java that is running on Jenkins controller instance on the agent. In my case it's OpenJDK 17.0.10 LTS.

Create a directory, c:\jenkins-agent\, to host Jenkins agent.jar, the service configuration file and the wrapper binary.

Write the configuration of the service:

# c:\jenkins-agent\jenkins-agent.xml
<service>
  <id>jenkins-agent</id>
  <name>Jenkins Agent</name>
  <description>This service runs the jenkins agent process</description>
  <executable>"C:\Program Files\jdk-17.0.10+7\bin\java.exe"</executable>
  <arguments>-jar "C:\jenkins-agent\agent.jar" -url http://JENKINS_HOST/ -secret JENKINS_AGENT_SECRET -name "jenkins-worker-1" -workDir "C:\jenkins"</arguments>
  <log mode="roll" />
  <onfailure action="restart" />
    <serviceaccount>
    <domain>JENKINSWORKER1</domain>
    <user>jenkins</user>
    <password>Passw0rd!</password>
    <allowservicelogon>true</allowservicelogon>
  </serviceaccount>
</service>

Make sure to add the user in Security Settings\Local Policies\User Rights Assignment\Log on as a service otherwise the service will not start

Download the latest release from WinSW and rename the binary to jenkins-agent.exe. The name of the file needs to match between the XML and EXE.

Install the service with:

c:\jenkins-agent\jenkins-agent.exe install

Further operations on the service can be done with

c:\jenkins-agent\jenkins-agent.exe [start || stop]