Our Team City server got to a state when nothing works including the `Start clean-up now' button, because the internal database size is >900MB. Yes, we are still trying to get a proper external database... In the meantime is there a way to shut down Team City and run the clean-up manually from the command line? How can we recover from this state otherwise?
We are running version 8.1.5.
It depends a lot on what do you want to clean up : artefacts, directory etc.
I ran into the same issues when I setup teamcity initially. I used to go into the agent work directories , figure out the directories taking the max space and run rm -rf on the agent work directories (the ones with the alphanumeric sha id) .
One good thing about our setup is that we named all our checkout directories , so it was very easy to identify multiple runs for the same build, so I used to delete every checkout build except the latest one.
In case you have artefact dependencies, I would advise you not to do this process
Related
My team has using TeamCity to automate some tiresome maintenance tasks, and over time, we've found we want to re-use common pieces, so we've got some common functions in a repository on Bitbucket.
For better or for worse, our Bitbucket has a daily backup/maintenance period that, when active, blocks all of our builds from running with the following error:
Failed to collect changes ... Bitbucket is currently unavailable
I've looked at the various checkout modes, though we're generally limited to checking out files on the server (Rather than agent). I had figured that if the files are checked out to the server, then if Bitbucket were unavailable, there would be some way to fall back on "Whatever is already there". Especially as we don't have Clean build checked.
Is there some way that we can fall back on whatever is already checked out on the TeamCity server? Or do we need to set up some kind of redundancy?
Yes you can.
you need to simply build a project in a directory location of a teamcity machine and then call the run from that location instead.
You can have a build with No VCS at all. This build run will utilize the folder you mentioned instead of cloning a VCS.
When a private agent build starts in VSTS, it gets assigned a directory, e.g. C:\vstsagent_work\1\s
Is there a way to set this to a different path? On other CI servers, like Jenkins, I can define a custom workspace for a job. I'm dealing with a huge monorepo and have dozens of build definitions around the same repository. It makes sense (to me anyway) to share a single directory on the build agent computer.
The benefit to me is that my builds can use pre-built components from upstream repositories, if they have already been built.
Thanks for any help
VSTS build always creates a working directory per build definition. This leaves you two options:
Create a single build definition and use conditionals on steps to skip certain steps in order to only run what is needed. This allows you to use the standard steps and may require a powershell script to figure out which steps to run and which ones to skip. Set variables from powershell using the special logging commands.
Disable the get sources step and add a step that manually fetches sources. You'll need to clean the working directory, checkout the right commit, basically replicating the actions in the get sources step manually. It may require some fidgeting to get all the behavior correctly for normal build, pull request builds etc. That way you can take full control over the location where sources are checked out.
I'd also recommend you investigate the 2017 project formats that use the new <packageReference> in the project files to fetch packages. The new system supports configuring a version range which can always fetch the latest available version of packages. It's a better long-term solution.
No, it isn’t available in VSTS build system.
You can change working directory of agent (C:\vstsagent_work) (Re-configure it and specify another working folder), but it won’t uses the same source folder for different build definitions, the folder would be 1, 2, 3 ….
I work for a fairly new web development company and we are currently testing subversion installations to implement a versioning system. One of the features we need the versioning system to perform is to update the development server with an edited file once it has been committed.
We would like to maintain one server for all of our SVN repositories, even though, due to system requirements, we need to maintain several separate development servers. I understand that the updates are fairly simple when the development server resides in the same location as SVN, but that is just not possible for us. So, we need to map separate network drives to the SVN server for each development server.
However, this errors on commit. Here is my working copy test directory, as referenced in the post-commit.bat file:
SET WORKING_COPY=Z:\testweb
This, however, results in an error...
post-commit hook failed (exit code 1) with output: svn: Error resolving case of 'Z:\testweb'
I'm sure this is because the server is not the same user as me and therefore does not have the share I need mapped to "Z" - I just have no idea how to work around this. Can anyone help?
UPDATE: The more I look in to these issues it appears that the real solution to the problem is to use a CI Server to accomplish what I am attempting to accomplish. I am currently looking in to TeamCity and what it might do for us.
Don't do this through a post-commit hook. If you ever manage to get the hook to succeed, you'll be causing the person who did the commit to wait until the update is complete. Instead, I recommend that you use Jenkins which is a continuous build engine.
It is possible that you don't have anything to build. After all, if you're using PHP or JavaScript, there's nothing to compile. However, you can still use Jenkins to do the update for you.
I can't get into the nitty-gritty detail hear, but one of the things you can do with Jenkins is redefine its working directory. You can do this by clicking on the Advanced button when you define a job, and it'll ask you where you want the working directory. In this case, you can specify your server's working directory.
One of the things you can do with Jenkins is have it automatically run tests, or maybe do a bit smoother update. For example, you might have to restart your web server when you change a few files, or maybe you need to make sure that if you're changing 100 files, they all get changed at once, or your server isn't in a stable state. You could use Jenkins to do this too. And, if there are any problems, you can have Jenkins email the person who is responsible for the server that the server update failed.
Jenkins is easy to setup and use. You can download it and start up Jenkins in 10 minutes. Setting up a job in Jenkins might take you another 15 minutes if you had never seen Jenkins before and had no idea how it works.
I'm having an issue with TeamCity, which relates to the fact that it runs the source control step before it runs the build steps. My project is a windows service, so there are complications with this.
TeamCity often decides to delete the entire contents of the project directory, even though I have the clean build option unchecked. However, since this is a windows service this does not fly, as when trying to delete the dll's it errors out since they're in use:
Error while applying patch: Failed to delete: F:\PathToService\bin\Release\Library.dll
The most frustrating part is that the dll's aren't even under source control, TeamCity seems to have a mind of its own and decides to delete them anyway.
Is there a way to get around this, to be able to run a build step BEFORE doing the svn checkout so that I can stop the windows service first?
I would try to set up your CI environment so it uninstalls the windows service once you are done testing it. I am not aware of Teamcity pre-checkout hook.
The answer was to split up each service into a separate working directory. That prevents teamcity from deleting the dll's.
I'm currently in the process of setting up a continuous integration environment at work. We are using VisualSVN Server and CrusieControl.NET. Occasionally a build will fail and a symptom is that there are conflicts in the CruiseControl.NET working copy. I believe this is due to the way I've setup the Visual Studio solutions. Hopefully the more projects we run in this environment the better our understanding of how to set them up will be so I'm not questioning why the conflicts happen at this stage. To fix the builds I delete the working copy and force a new build - this works every time (currently). So my questions are: is deleting the working copy a valid part of a continuous integration build process, and how do I go about it?
I've tried solutions including MSTask and calling delete from the command line but I'm not having any luck.
Sorry for being so wordy - good job this is a beta :)
Doing a full delete before or after your build is good practice. This means that there is no chance of your build environment picking up an out of date file. Your building exactly against what is in the repository.
Deleting the working copy is possible as I have done it with Nant.
In Nant I would have a clean script in its own folder outwith the one I want to delete and would then invoke it from CC.net.
I assume this should also be possible with a batch file. Take a look at the rmdir command http://www.computerhope.com/rmdirhlp.htm
#pauldoo
I prefer my CI server to do a full delete as I don't want any surprise when I go to do a release build, which should always be done from a clean state. But it should be able to handle both, no reason why not
#jamie: There is one reason why you may not be able to do a clean build every time when using a continuous integration server -- build time. On some projects I've worked on, clean builds take 80+ minutes (an embedded project consisting of thousands of C++ files to checkout and then compile against multiple targets). In this case, you have to weigh the benefit of fast feedback against the likelihood that a clean build will catch something that an incremental build won't. In our case, we worked on improving and parallelizing the build process while at the same time allowing incremental builds on our CI machine. We did have a few problems because we weren't doing clean builds, but by doing a clean build nightly or weekly you could remove the risk without losing the fast feedback of your CI machine.
If you check out CC.NET's jira there is a patch checked in to implement CleanCopy for Subversion which does exactly what you want and just set CleanCopy equal to true inside your source control block just like with the TFS one.
It is very common and generally a good practice for any build process to do a 'clean' before doing any significant build. This prevents any 'artifacts' from previous builds to taint the output.
A clean is essentially what you are doing by deleting the working copy.
#Brad Barker
Clean means to just wipe out build products.
Deleting the working copy deletes everything else too (source and project files etc).
In general it's nice if you're build machine can operate without doing a full delete, as this replicates what a normal developer does. Any conflicts it finds during update are an early warning to what your developers can expect.
#jamie
For formal releases yes it's better to do a completely clean checkout. So I guess it depends on the purpose of the build.