What is the best way to add software to an Elastic Agent?

Question

I am new to Bamboo and would like to try building my Play Framework application. However, I am using Bamboo Cloud so I can only have Elastic Agents. I need to install Play into the agent (and ideally add it to the $PATH). I may need to add other software too - Scala, SBT, maybe Redis, etc.

What is the best way to do so? Do I need to create my own AMI with this software, or is there a simpler way?

Daniel Siegmann · Accepted Answer

I eventually settled on placing the software I need in an EBS volume, which I attached to the out-of-the-box Ubuntu image provided in Bamboo. There is documentation on the Bamboo wiki: Configuring elastic instances to use the EBS.

Once the EBS snapshot was created and linked to the image, I added an executable command capability to the elastic agent, which can be added to a job as a task. Note that it isn't possible to define shared capabilities for elastic agents in Bamboo 5.5 - see BAM-14837.

I wouldn't exactly call this simple, but it isn't too difficult to set up (or wouldn't have been, if I hadn't encountered a couple of bugs - Atlassian support helped me through them). It seems to be the recommended option in the documentation, thought it's hard to tell. Custom AMIs are possible but explicitly unsupported, so I decided to avoid them.

I do wish Atlassian provided clearer guidance for new Bamboo Cloud users. The documentation seems geared more toward Bamboo Server.