I am trying to sideload an appx package into a windows 10 machine which is part of a deployment group using a release pipeline in azure DevOps. The problem is the agent deployed by azure DevOps runs as local system account and a appx package has to be installed for the current user account only.
The same challenge with the user accounts, we faced earlier and ended up creating our own service running as a domain user account, which does download and install the MSI which internally installs the appx package as well.
We are exploring Azure DevOps to see if there is a better way to control the deployment on multiple client machines and also to achieve CI/CD.
please note we do not have option to go with windows stores or using group policy with AD.
Update: Yes, there is an option to change the agent service to run as a domain user account; in fact, this is what our own agent is doing, but the challenge is that we have to manually connect a VPN in order for the service to validate the domain user, and this is defeating the purpose of this whole automation.
Based on your description, the cause of the issue is that the target agent in the deployment group is running as local system account and need to change to run as current user account.
To solve this issue, you can navigate to local system -> Service and find the running agent service(for example: Azure Pipelines Agent (orgname.deploymentgroupname.agentname)).
Then you could change the log on account as current user account.
Finally, you can restart the Agent service and the deployment group agent will run as current user account.