A noob question, but googling and stack overflow search didn't seem to yield an answer.
Can someone explain what exactly are teamcity artifacts?
From the documentation
"Typically these include distribution packages, WAR files, reports,
log files, etc. When creating a build configuration, you specify artifacts
of your build at the General Settings page.
It doesn't really explain to me what an artifact is. A .Net oriented answer will be very helpful. I have a couple of builds already working on teamcity, but I'm not sure what exactly I would need an artifact for ?
thank you
Artifacts are the files you want the TeamCity server to store so that they can be downloaded after the build has finished. They will be downloadable from the TeamCity dashboard from each build.
For a .NET project you might choose the store the output of the compiler (i.e. .exe and .dll files), and the log files from running unit tests. You might just have a Windows Installer package (i.e. .msi).
It is completely up to you what gets stored for your specific needs. Just note that build artifacts do take up disk space on the TeamCity server, so if yours are large you'll want to configure the Build History Clean-up rules.
Related
So I have this pretty huge solution with many projects, few of them use dlls from other projects in this solution, some projects copy files to other directories after build is performed. (as post build events)
when I build the solution locally on my machine, everything is great and working, but when i configure a build, and build it on build server (we use TFS) something goes wrong and i get a an error when i try to load one of the applications in this solution. (the error does not give me much data on what went wrong)
so before i sit to debug all of this. does anybody know how can i smartly manage all the build actions that are performed locally and via build server and see the deltas?
I would like to be able to build the solution exactly the same on build server as i do on my machine (with directory structure, post build events..etc)
thanks a lot
The generally accepted way to do what you're after is to use NuGet for managing your assembly references. You can publish your dependent assemblies into NuGet as part of a continuous delivery process, then reference (and update!) those dependencies in the solutions that consume them as necessary.
This removes ambiguity ("What version of Foo.dll is Project X using?") and reduces runtime errors ("Why is Project X using Foo.dll 3.0? It was never tested with 3.0! It needs to run with 2.7!").
Our company currently uses TFS for source control and build server. Most of our projects are written in C/C++, but we also have some .NET projects and wouldn't want to be limited if we need to use other languages in the future.
We'd like to use Git for our source control and we're trying to understand what would be the best choice for a build server. We have started looking into TeamCity, but there are some issues we're having trouble with which will probably be relevant regardless of our choice of build server:
Build dependencies - We'd like to be able to control the build dependencies for each <project, branch>. For example, have <MyProj, feature_branch> depend on <InfraProj1, feature_branch> and <InfraProj2, master>.
From what we’ve seen, to do that we might need to use Gradle or something similar to build our projects instead of plain MSBuild. Is this correct? Are there simpler ways of achieving this?
Local builds - Obviously we'd like to be able to build projects locally as well. This becomes somewhat of a problem when project dependencies are introduced, as we need a way to reference these resources or copy them locally for the build to succeed. How is this usually solved?
I'd appreciate any input, but a sample setup which covers these issues will also be a great help.
IMHO both issues you mention fall really in the config management category, thus, as you say, unrelated to the build server choice.
A workspace for a project build (doesn't matter if centralized or local) should really contain all necessary resources for the build.
How can you achieve that? Have a project "metadata" git repo with a "content" file containing all your project components and their dependencies (each with its own git/other repo) and their exact versions - effectively tying them together coherently (you may find it useful to store other metadata in this component down the road as well, like component specific SCM info if using a mix of SCMs across the workspace).
A workspace pull wrapper script would first pull this metadata git repo, parse the content file and then pull all the other project components and their dependencies according with the content file info. Any build in such workspace would have all the parts it needs.
When time comes to modify either the code in a project component or the version of one of the dependencies you'll need to also update this content file in the metadata git repo to reflect the update and commit it - this is how your project makes progress coherently, as a whole.
Of course, actually managing dependencies is another matter. Tons of opinions out there, some even conflicting.
I'm extremely new to TeamCity and need to copy files from one TeamCity agent to another. I'm basically looking for some conceptual direction so I can start researching on how to accomplish the following:
Currently have a TeamCity Agent which builds program and creates corresponding artifacts. I need to copy these artifacts to another TeamCity Agent machine.
I'm getting acquainted with the build steps, we are using a commandline build runner. So I'll need to setup the build step for copying files via commandline--any hints on how to get started is greatly appreciated.
I apologize for any conceptual or term errors. I guess this is why I'm posting this question.
Kme,
In case you want to re-use the results of one build in another (e.g., run tests using results of compilation), you should take a look at two things:
Publish your build artifacts to server (more details here)
Download an artifact from server before build starts (more details here)
This will allow TeamCity to ensure that artifacts arrive at correct agent at correct moment of time. Also TeamCity will track usages of such artifacts.
We have a lot of different solutions/projects which are managed by different teams. Our solution needs to reference several projects that another team owns. We don't want to add these dependencies as project references because we do not intend on modifying that code, we just want to use it. Also we already have quite a bit of projects in our solution and don't want to add a bunch more since it will slow down Visual Studio. So we are building these projects in a separate solution and adding them as file references to our solution.
My question is, how do people manage these types of dependencies? Should I just have some automated process what looks for changes to those projects, builds them and checks the dlls into our source control, after which we treat them like other 3rd party dependencies? Is there a recommended way of doing this?
One solution, although it may not necessarily be what you are looking for, is to have each dependent sub-system perform a release. This release could be in the form of a MSI install, or just a network share of assemblies. When a significant change is made, that team could let you know, and you could run the install or a script to copy the files.
Once you got the release, you could put them into the GAC, that way you would not have to worry about copying them to your project bin folders.
Another solution, assuming you are using a build server or continuous integration of some kind, is to have a post build step or process stage the files. Than at any given moment, the developers of the other teams could grab the new files , or have a script or bat file pull them down locally.
EDIT - ANOTHER SOLUTION
It might be best to ask why do you have these dependencies? Do you really need them locally when building your part of the application? Could you mock out the dependencies in your solution, allowing you to code, build, and run unit tests? The the actual application would wire these up in your DEV/Test/Prod environments. Keeping your solution decoupled and dependent free may be a better solution for the individual team. Leave the integration and coupling when the application runs in a real setting.
(Not a complete answer, but still:)
Any delivery is better stored in a file/binary repository, as opposed to a VCS used to manage sources history.
We prefer managing those deliveries in a repo like Nexus, and we are using maven to get back the right dependencies.
Even if those tools can be more Java-oriented, Nexus can store anything, and maven is only there to read the pom.xml of each artifact and compute the right dependencies.
These questions are for TeamCity users only
1) Is it possible to configure TeamCity to extract build artifact information based on your own your regular expressions? This is exactly what Pulse does here
2) Does TeamCity integrate with any task/bug tracking tool? like JIRA?
3) This question is for people who run static code analyzer only. A tool like PC-Lint/Visual Lint can generate XML reports. Can TeamCity be configured to parse these artifacts and generate a build failure?
4) I'm currently evaluating TeamCity right now...there community forum doesnt seem to be very active. For those who pay for support, how is Jetbrains support? Is it good? Atlassian seems to be much better.
TeamCity allows to get build artifacts with a Ant-based pattern. You can specify multiple patterns and set target directory for each pattern. Read more at http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/TCD4/Build+Artifact
There is an integration which allows to link RF-3432 to the Jira issue. More advanced integration may appear in the next release of TC. Read more at http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/TCD4/Mapping+External+Links+in+Comments
Only with custom plugin. Or your build process can send a specific "echo" message which will change build status and description.
OK, I'm JetBrainer. May be we don't response immediately, but we strive to answer forum questions ASAP. Paid customers also have e-mail support.
Hope this helps,
KIR
Disclaimer: I don't work for JetBrains! But I've worked with Pulse and TeamCity in my current job.
Build Artifacts: Yes, TeamCity will export artifacts that remain after a build. You can add define ant-style wildcard patterns to match files (the default pattern matches any files left in the root build directory). These files can be seen from the project view against each individual build.
You can use special service commands in a build script to immediately export artifacts along the way too, I do this for a code complexity tool that generates xml files, for which I've also defined a custom graph.
Bug Tracking: I don't have experience with this, but KIR pointed out some alternatives.
XML Parsing: You can control this with ant. I included a third-party tool called andariel in my build that can run XPaths across xml documents, then used service messages to export the result (in this case a count of methods exceeding a complexity limit) to be displayed in a custom graph.
I believe you could also publish the artifacts, provide TeamCity with an XSL to render the XML, and create an additional tab in your build results to display it (however I have not done this)
Tech Support: I've found the community forums to be pretty good, most questions I've had answered within a day or two by both civilians and Jetbrains employees, and I was using the free 'Professional' version.
I can only imagine that email support will be just as good if not better!
I am a little confused about this question because my use of TeamCity, TC (and I guess the design principles of TC) is to allow the build script (and not TC) to remain the correspondent of build imperatives.
In other words, if you need TeamCity to do something cool, just add that cool stuff in your build script either using an existing task in your build system or write one yourself.
TeamCity supports NAnt, MSBuild, Ant and am sure, any other build platform you can install on on the buildagents.
The only integration I will want TC or any other CI platform to have is source control integration with my choice of SC. The rest of the integration should be controlled by my build script. That way, I only configure my TC once at the beginning of project for each project and then, don't touch it ever again. In contrast, the build can change per version.
So, the indirect answer to your question is Yes, theoretically, through the build script.
Hope this helps.