I’d like to be able to specify that one build project should pause while another specified project is running.
In my case, there is a project #1 that builds and deploys compiled code to our servers, and a project #2 that performs Selenium tests on that deployed code. The tests can take several minutes, and I’d like to make sure that the build-and-deploy doesn’t happen in the middle of testing.
So, I’d like to pause #1 (build) while #2 (test) is running.
Dependencies or Triggers do not offer this option, as far as I can tell. Can this be configured?
There is a request on TeamCity issue tracker TW-3798. You are welcome to vote and watch.
This functionality is currently being developed. For now you can use one of the features provided by GroovyPlugin called StartBuildPrecondition. To ensure that only one build is executed add the same write lock to both of the builds
The way we do this is by restricting them to one build agent. They you are insured that only one runs at a time.
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I'm looking for a tool of some kind that i can integrate into our CI process to keep track of the manual steps we have.
As an example, we want to run through some manual test scripts on the integration server before pushing the version to the test server. Currently QA gets a notification when the build is done, executes the manual testing and then tells someone to push the version to test if it's okay.
What i would love to find is something that will keep track of when the manual tests have been successfully completed and automatically push the version to test.
It should will be possible to notify/trigger the tool from Visual Studio Online and have it trigger the next step in VSO as well.
I've been googling various different things, but can't seem to find anything close to what i'm looking for. Todo list tools like Asana doesn't seem to have the integration point we need, but maybe i'm just missing something?
You can use the new Release Management tools in conjunction with test cases to get what you want.
In VSTS you can create test cases to reflect the steps of the tests that you want and then create a Test Plan or Suit to reflect the list of tests that you need to run manually.
Then as part of your release process you could create a custom task that waits for a Test Run to be completed against you list. If that test run has all pass then move to the next step, if any tests fail then fail the release.
This should be fairly easy to setup and you need to call the API to check the Test Run. If your Testers use Microsoft Test Manager you can also have the results associated with the Build that you are deploying and get full traceability.
You can try with the Release Management tool in VSTS. It can achieve partial features you want.
I assume you have three steps in your build definition:
Build solution
Publish to integration server
Publish to test server
You can keep the first two steps in build definition. And then create a release definition in Release Management and add the third steps in it. Configure the definition to "Continuous deployment" and link it to your build definition. Assign your QA to be the approver for this release task. Now, a release task will be created as soon as a build task completes. But it will be pending for the approver (Your QA) to approve. Approve the release task after the test is passed, the build will be published to the test server. Otherwise, reject it.
I have a setup where our code builds to dev every 5 hours on a schedule trigger. This works great, but the downside that the code could sit in teamcity for hours before it triggers and alerts us to a build error.
Is there a way to have a VCS trigger also run the build as soon as its checked in, but passing something to our NANT script to say "just build, don't deploy"?
I know I must be missing something.. is there any way to achieve this?
The only way I could think of was to have an entirely separate build configuration, but that seemed rather wasteful
You can setup a new build with a VCS trigger and then have that build have a env/system variable set that your build script can read to determine whether or not to deploy to dev.
See TeamCity Docs for information around this. I've used something like this in setting up builds before and it works well.
Our busy enterprise server has 550 active build configurations running on 30 agents. We need a way to prevent some builds from running while other builds are running. I already understand artefact dependencies and this does not solve our problem as the builds do not depend on each other they just share some resources like server port numbers and database connections. Some build configurations conflict with each other when run simultaneously and we need to prevent this by having a way to queue a build (rather than run it) when one of a number of other builds are running.
We already use dumb tricks like restricting builds to specific agents, etc... I'm thinking about adding a first build step that checks for a flag in a db table or something but this would add lots of failed builds when what we really need is proper build queueing.
Am I missing something? Does this functionality already exist in TeamCity?
It looks like what you need is on its way in the form of TeamCity 8 Shared Resources. You can already get access to the EAP here.
My huge respect for 550 configurations and 30 agents.
I think you already found the solution:
Have one environment per agent
Assign configuration for specific agents
I could imagine how much it is work. But I think it's much cleaner and will work much faster than restriction to run several configurations at the same time.
we're trying to improve our Jenkins setup. So far we have two directories: /plugins and /tests.
Our project is a multi-module project of Eclipse Plugins. The test plugins in the /tests folder are fragment projects dependent on their corresponding productive code plugins in /plugins.
Until now, we had just one Jenkins job which checked out both /plugins and /tests, built all of them and produced the Surefire results etc.
We're now thinking about splitting the project into smaller jobs corresponding to features we provide. It seems that the way we tried to do it is suboptimal.
We tried the following:
We created a job for the core feature. This job checks out the whole /plugins and /tests directories and only builds the plugins the feature is comprised of. This job has a separate pom.xml which defines the core artifact and tells about the modules contained in the feature.
We created a separate job for the tests that should be run on the feature plugins. This job uses the cloned workspace from the core job. This job is to be run after the core feature is built.
I somehow think this is less than optimal.
For instance, only the core job can update the checked out files. If only the tests are updated, the core feature does not need to be built again, but it will be.
As soon as I have a feature which is dependent on the core feature, this feature would either need to use a clone of the core feature workspace or check out its own copy of /plugins and /tests, which would lead to bloat.
Using a cloned workspace, I can't update my sources. So when I have a feature depending on another feature, I can only do the job if the core feature is updated and built.
I think I'm missing some basic stuff here. Can someone help? There definitely is an easier way for this.
EDIT: I'll try to formulate what I think would ideally happen if everything works:
check if the feature components have changed (i.e. an update on them is possible)
if changed, build the feature
Build the dependent features, if necessary (i.e. check ob corresponding job)
Build the feature itself
if build successful, start feature test job
let me see the results of the test job in the feature job
Finally, the project job should
do a nightly build
check out all sources from /plugins and /tests
build all, test all, send results to Sonar
Additionally, it would be neat if the nightly build was unnecessary because the builds and test results of the projects' features would be combined in the project job results.
Is something like this possible?
Starting from the end of the question. I would keep a separate nightly job that does a clean check-out (gets rid of any generated stuff before check-out), builds everything from scratch, and runs all tests. If you aren't doing a clean build, you can't guarantee that what is checked into your repository really builds.
check if the feature components have changed (i.e. an update on them is possible)
if changed, build the feature
Build the dependent features, if necessary (i.e. check ob corresponding job)
Build the feature itself
if build successful, start feature test job
let me see the results of the test job in the feature job
[I am assuming that by "dependent features" in 1 you mean the things needed by the "feature" in 2.]
To do this, I would say that you have multiple jobs.
a job for every individual feature and every dependent feature that simply builds that feature. The jobs should be started by SCM changes for the (dependent) feature.
I wouldn't keep separate test jobs from compile jobs. It allows the possibility that successfully compiled code is never tested. Instead, I would rely on the fact that wen a build step fails in Jenkins, it normally aborts further build steps.
The trick is going to be in how you thread all of these together.
Let's say we have a feature and it's build job called F1 that is built on 2 dependent features DF1.1 and DF1.2, each with their own build jobs.
Both DF1.1 and DF1.2 should be configured to trigger the build of F1.
F1 should be configured to get the artifacts it needs from the latest successful DF1.1 and DF1.2 builds. Unfortunately, the very nice "Clone SCM" plugin is not going to be of much help here as it only pulls from one previous job. Perhaps one of the artifact publisher plugins might be useful, or you may need to add some custom build steps to put/get artifacts.
I am tasked to improve quality and implement TeamCity for continuous integration. My experience with TeamCity is very limited - I use mostly TFS myself and have some experience with CC.NET.
A lot should happen within a build process... actually the build is already pushed into three different configurations that will run one after the next.
My main problem is that in each of those I actually would need to start multiple runners. For example, the first build step shall consist of:
The generation of new AssemblyInfo.cs files for consistent in assembly numbering
The actual compilation
A partial unit test run (all tests that run fast and check core functionality)
An FxCop run
A StyleCop run
The current version of TeamCity only allows to configure one runner ... which leaves me stuck with a lot of things.
How you would approach this? My current idea is going towards using the MsBuild runner for everything and basically start my own MsBuild based script which then does all the things, pretty much the way that TFS handles it (and the same way i did things back in the cc.net way with my own Nant build script).
On a further problem the question is how to present statistical information, for example from unit tests running in different stages (build configurations). We have some further down that take some time to run and want that to run in a 2nd or 3rd step (the latest for example testing database generation code which, including loading base data, takes about 15+ minutes to run). OTOH we would really like test results to be somehow consolidated.
Anyone any ideas?
Thanks.
TeamCity 6.0 allows multiple build steps for a single build configuration. Isn't it what you're looking for?
You'll need to script this out, at least parts of it. TeamCity provides some nice UI based config for some of your needs, but not all. Here's my suggestion:
Create an msbuild script to handle your first two bullet points, AssemblyInfo generation and compilation. Configure the msbuild runner to run your script, and to run your tests. Collect your assemblies as artifacts.
Create a second build configuration for FxCop. Trigger it from the first build. Give it an 'artifact dependency' on the first build, which is how it gets a hold of your dlls.
For StyleCop, TC doesn't support it out of the box like it does FxCop. Add it to your msbuild script manually, and have it produce an html report (which TeamCity can then display).
You need to take a look at the Dependencies functionality in the TeamCity. This feature allows you to create a sequence of build configurations. In other words, you need to create a build configuration for each step and then link all them as dependencies.
For consolidating test results please take a loot at the Artifact Dependencies. It might help.