• Date: 2025-12-19
• Status: Success

Context

The goal is to build an Enterprise-grade Yocto Build Farm without the enterprise budget. Cloud computing for Yocto (50GB+ builds, 12+ cores) is too expensive ($200+/mo). I need to leverage my powerful Home PC (Ryzen/Intel i9, 32GB RAM) while keeping the orchestration accessible from the internet.

Challenges

1. Exposure: How to expose a local Jenkins instance securely without opening ports on my home router (security risk).
2. Connectivity: Connecting a Cloud VPS Master to a Local Agent behind a residential NAT.

The Work

• Infrastructure: Provisioned a cheap VPS (Hetzner/DigitalOcean) running Coolify.
• Orchestration: Deployed Jenkins LTS (Dockerized) on the VPS.
• Networking: Setup Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel.
  • Win: No open ports on the home router. Traffic is tunneled securely via WebSocket.
• Agent: Created a custom Docker image jenkins-agent-yocto based on jenkins/inbound-agent.
  • Installed Yocto dependencies (gawk, wget, git, diffstat, unzip, texinfo, gcc, build-essential, chrpath, socat, cpio, python3, python3-pip, xz-utils, debianutils, iputils-ping, python3-git, python3-jinja2, libegl1-mesa, libsdl1.2-dev, pylint, xterm, python3-subunit, mesa-common-dev).

Outcome

• Master is live within the Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel.
• Agent is running on the Home PC and successfully connected to the Cloud Master.
• I have a "Split Architecture": Brain in the Cloud, Muscle at Home.

Next Steps

• Solve the storage problem. Yocto builds are huge. I need an Artifact Server.

Contributors: Vasu Grover

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