Copilot coding agent is our asynchronous, autonomous background agent. Delegate a task to Copilot, and Copilot works in the background in its own development environment, powered by GitHub Actions.

By default, the agent use a Linux development environment. If your project targets Windows, you can now configure Copilot coding agent to use a Windows environment, still powered by GitHub Actions.

With a working development environment, Copilot can ensure your project builds and your automated tests and linter pass, so you get a green pull request on the first try.

You can configure Copilot coding agent to use Windows by creating a copilot-setup-steps.yml file in your repository with a custom runs-on setting.

Copilot coding agent’s integrated firewall is not compatible with Windows, so we recommended that you only use Windows with self-hosted runners or larger runners with Azure private networking where you can implement your own network controls.

To learn more about switching Copilot coding agent to a Windows development environment, see “Customizing the development environment for Copilot coding agent” in the GitHub Docs.