Teamcity build for live after successful CI build? - continuous-integration

I have an environmental build system which currently has the following environments:
dev
ci
uat
live
Just to be clear when I say environmental build I mean there are a set of properties files for each environment and during the build these properties are used to template project files, so a database server may be "localhost" on dev environment but "12.34.56.78" on CI. So when starting the build you can give it an environment property and it will build for something other than dev (which is the default environment).
Now the CI build works fine and spits out the artifacts correctly, however as the build is CI all of it is configured to work on that environment, and I am looking at being able to trigger a build for live or uat when a CI build succeeds. This would then run the same build but with a different build argument.
Now I noticed there are a few mechanisms for this, one seems to be doing an automatic trigger on complete which could trigger another build, but this seems to require 2 separate build configurations which are essentially identical other than the build argument being "environment=live" rather than "environment=ci". Then there is adding another build step which would be the same as the first but take different argument and output the live artifacts elsewhere, but this would always happen much like the first option.
The final option I could see was to trigger a manual build once I have a live candidate, but it is unclear as to how to set a build argument, I could make a build parameter however it doesn't seem to get pulled into the build script like a command like build argument would.

I will see if there is a better answer, but after writing this I found that using Build Parameters seems the best option, this then can be embedded within your build configuration anywhere using the %environment% (or %your_parameter_here%).
This can then be setup to create a form element for manual builds so you can easily create a build for a different environments.

Related

Run newman on the local build instead of deploying to a test environment using TeamCity

I am looking to be able to run my postman scripts using newman during a TeamCity build.
Instead of deploying the build to a test environment, I'd like to run the postman scripts on that particular build, so it isn't deployed to an environment used by other developers which could potentially break it.
My current build chain in TeamCity is:
Build main project (contains the REST Api and all required code)
Run Postman scripts using Newman on that project
I have the collection and environment file, along with the CLI command to call it. When I try and point the environment for a local build, it does not work.
I am thinking of running an IIS Express server on the agent and then with that active port, run the tests but I have been unsuccessful.
Any ideas on how to approach this would be appreciated!
I have looked at How do I integrate my Postman Integration Tests with TeamCity and this uses a test environment, which is not what I am after.
I looked at https://ie.com.au/a-how-set-up-automated-api-testing and this was helpful, but I think this is still reliant on setting up a test envrionment.
TeamCity isn't really equipped to handle what you are trying to do. You are trying to run API tests against a build, in order to do that, you'll need an environment. You need something to run your project in order to query against it.
The only potential path you might try looking at is containerizing your project, in docker or something similar, then running your image after it's built and querying against that. However this isn't a great practice and bloats the build time.
A good practice would be to build your project > deploy it to a test environment, you should set up a separate 'test' or 'dev' environment that is ok being broken > after deploy trigger a service to run your tests against the 'dev'

Multiple types of build for different build triggers

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.

In TeamCity, is there a system/environment variable for the current build configuration id?

In TeamCity, if you know the build configuration id, then you can generate URLs like this:
http://example.org/guestAuth/repository/download/bt222/.lastSuccessful/exampleBuild.zip
But see that "bt222"? That's the Build Configuration ID; it is generated by TC when you set up the build configuration, and it's static. The Atlassian docs seem to say that the way to determine it is to look at your URL, on screen.
Thing is, I need to get at it programmatically, in the msbuild script, so that the same build script can serve multiple build configurations. TC otherwise has so many nice handy variables that I'm just hoping I've missed it somehow...
The configuration ID is available as %system.teamcity.buildType.id%.
Verified to work in Teamcity 7.1.5
Make it as parameter to your build script and set it in build configuration settings from outside.
Build script should not depend on the build server, it should work locally as well.
It seems a bit shaky to rely on these ids, maybe you can approach it from another angle, and use Dependent builds and artefacts? Have you looked into that? We use that a lot to communicate files from one build configuration to another.

Maven, switching to a different profile

I have a problem with proper maven profile configuration of a project that is deployed to a continuous integration server.
In my project, there are some resources that needs to be included only during tests at the daily building phase and others that needs to be included during nightly builds, and they can never be included both at the same time, because building process will fail, I can achive this locally by activating one profile at the same time.
Continuous integration server runs following maven commands:
-during daily builds:
mvn clean package -Pci -Dci
-during nightly builds
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.failure.ignore -Pci,nightly -Dci -Dnightly
As you see, nightly build command include maven variables and profiles defined in daily build command, which makes some troubles for me, becouse I want to have only one profile activated at the same time.
Specifically, what I want is having 3 separate profiles:
-my-pforile (activated by default, not used on CI server)
-ci-profile (activated only on daily builds, used on CI server)
-nightly-profile (activated only on nightly builds, used on CI server)
How can I achieve that? I tried almost everything. Reconfiguring CI server is not an option.
When I have to configure the same build with different profiles, using Jenkins as a CI,
I usually create as much builds as profiles, so each build uses the correct configuration.
If adding a new build is not an option probably you can try to create a workaround
using something like the exec plugin (http://mojo.codehaus.org/exec-maven-plugin/) to download
the resources from a ftp (or something else).
You will have also to create a cron job (or equivalent) to replace the correct resources between the builds:
in the evening you put there the resources for the night, in the morning the ones for the day.
But considering how cumbersome this process will be, probably it is better to try to add
a new build.

Schedule specific build target in Jenkins?

The group that I work in has standardized on Jenkins for Continuous Integration builds. Code check-in triggers a standard build, Cobertura analysis and publish to an Artifactory SNAPSHOT repo. I've just finished adding a new target to the master build file that'll kick off a Sonar run but I don't want that running on every check-in.
Is there a way to schedule a nightly build of a specific build target in Jenkins? Jenkins obviously facilitates scheduled builds but it'll run the project's regular build every time. I'd like to be able to schedule the Sonar build target to run nightly.
I could, of course, create a separate Jenkins project just to run the Sonar target on a schedule but I'm trying to avoid that if I can. Our Jenkins server already has several hundred builds on it; doubling that for the sake of scheduling nightly builds isn't very desirable. I looked for a Jenkins plug-in that might facilitate this but I couldn't find anything. Any suggestions?
Here's one way to do it, if you are ok with triggering the build using cron or some other scheduling tool:
Make the build parameterized, and use a parameter in your build file to decide if the Sonar build target should run or not.
Trigger the build remotely by HTTP POST:ing the parameter values as a form to http://[jenkins-host]/jobs/[jobname]/buildWithParameters. Depending on your Jenkins version and configuration, you might need to add an Authentication Token and include this in your url.
Authenticate your POST using a username and password.
wget --auth-no-challenge --http-user=USERNAME --http-password=PASSWORD "https://[jenkins-host]/job/[jobname]/buildWithParameters?token=<token defined in job configuration>&<param>=<value>&<param2>=<value2>"
I am also looking for a solution for this. My current solution in my mind is to create 2 triggers in the regular build, one is the nightly build, another one is Polling SCM
In the sonar plugin configuration, it has the options to skip the builds triggered by the SCM change. Therefore, only the nightly build will start a sonar analysis.
I didn't get a chance to test it now, but I suppose this will work.
Updated on 12/19/2011
The above solution doesn't work if the sonar analysis is invoked as a standalone build step. To make the sonar analysis run conditionally, you could use the following 2 plugins:
Conditional BuildStep Plugin - this allows the sonar analysis to be run conditionally
Jenkins Environment Injector Plug-in - this allows you to inject the variables to indicate how the build is triggered.

Resources