Creating a new Windows VM image for Bazel's CI

The key thing to keep in mind is that the Windows setup for Jenkins has nothing magic about it that makes it a Jenkins slave VM. It's just a normal Windows setup with a few pre-installed tools that you would install on a workstation anyway. The Jenkins-specific setup is then handled completely automatic by the PowerShell script in gce/jenkins-slave-windows-2016.ps1.

Modifying an existing image

Instead of recreating the image from scratch, it is also fine to just take an existing image that was generated using an earlier version of these instructions, create a VM using it, make the necessary changes, run GCESysprep again and create a new image from the VM disk.

Necessary steps

• Create a new GCE VM with Windows Server 2016.

• Temporarily enable RDP access to the VM via:

  • gcloud compute firewall-rules create $USER-rdp --allow=tcp:3389,udp:3389 --source-ranges=$(curl v4.ifconfig.co)/32

• Set a new Windows password, note it somewhere and connect via RDP.

• Server Manager -> Configure this local server

  • Deactivate Windows Firewall.
  • Deactivate Windows Defender.
  • Deactivate IE Enhanced Security Configuration.
  • Set time zone to Europe/Berlin.

• Download and install Google Chrome. Pin to taskbar, unpin IE.

• Settings -> Update & security

  • For developers -> [x] Developer mode. Click all three “Apply” buttons below.
  • Windows Update -> Advanced options -> Check “Give me updates for other Microsoft products”.
  • Windows Update -> Check updates, then install all updates.
    • Reboot if necessary.
    • Repeat until no more updates are found.

• Go to https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/

  • Download latest stable Python 3.x (64-Bit).
  • Start installation.
    • Check “Install launcher for all users”.
    • Check “Add Python to PATH”.
    • Customize installation, check all boxes.
    • Check “Install for all users”.
    • Customize install location: C:\Python3
    • When setup is complete, click “Disable path length limit”, then close setup.

• Go to http://www.msys2.org/

  • Download latest x86_64 msys2 setup.
  • Install to C:\msys64.
  • Launch msys2 shell from installer, run “pacman -Syuu”, forcibly close terminal window when prompted.
  • Launch “MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit” shell, run “pacman -Syuu”, install all updates.
  • Run “pacman -S git curl zip unzip gcc zlib-devel isl tar patch”.
  • Open a cmd.exe with administrator privileges and run:
    • mkdir c:\tools
    • mklink /j c:\tools\msys64 c:\msys64

• Go to http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html

  • Download and install latest “Windows x64” JDK 8.

• Go to http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools

  • Download “Visual C++ Build Tools 2015”.
  • Start installation, choose “Custom”, select all options, install.

• Go to https://nssm.cc/download

  • Download “nssm 2.24-101-g897c7ad (2017-04-26)” or later build.
  • Create new folder: “C:\Program Files\nssm”.
  • Extract nssm.exe from the download ZIP file's “win64” folder into the just created folder.

• Install the Android SDK:

  • Download the command-line tools from: https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html#downloads
  • Extract the ZIP into C:\bazel_ci\android (create missing folders if necessary).
  • Open a cmd.exe with administrator privileges and run:
    • cd \bazel_ci\android
    • ren tools tools.old
    • tools.old\bin\sdkmanager tools
    • rd /s /q tools.old
    • tools\bin\sdkmanager --install platform-tools build-tools;27.0.3 platforms;android-24 platforms;android-25 platforms;android-26 platforms;android-27 extras;android;m2repository

• Install the Android NDK:

  • Download the NDK from here: https://dl.google.com/android/repository/android-ndk-r14b-windows-x86_64.zip
  • Extract the ZIP into C:\bazel_ci.

• Start -> Search for “path” -> Choose “Edit the system environment variables”

  • Click “Environment Variables”. Do the following actions in the lower “System variables” part of the UI.
  • Add “C:\Program Files\nssm” to the PATH variable.
  • Set BAZEL_VC to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC”
  • Set BAZEL_SH to “C:\msys64\usr\bin\bash.exe”
  • Set JAVA_HOME to “C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_152” (or the latest version installed)
  • Set ANDROID_HOME to “C:\bazel_ci\android”.
  • Set ANDROID_NDK_HOME to “C:\bazel_ci\android-ndk-r10e”.

• Start -> Type “GCESysprep”, run it.

  • The system will shut down and prepare itself for being used as an image to create new VMs.