Jenkins does not attempt to update existing code. Clones every time - continuous-integration

I'm attempting to get jenkins to build a project, but it seems to want to do a fresh clone everytime for some reason. I get this error:
none: ssh://hg#bitbucket.org/marc/repo/
which looks different than ssh://hg#bitbucket.org/marc/repo/
so falling back to fresh clone rather than incremental update
Is there something that would cause this? The two mentioned URLs are the same.

Turns out that with the debug option set to true (in the global jenkins settings for Mercurial) it will not update (but will clone), so this is a bug in the mercurial plugin for jenkins, but with a workaround that you can disable debug.

Your build probably changes some files/directories in the original structure of your local copy. Jenkins detects it and restarts fresh to be clean.
regards
didier

Related

Is it possible to run a TeamCity build with a VCS Root that is unavailable?

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.

Getting Maven to Report Which File Has Local Modifications

I have a Jenkins job that builds a simple Maven project. If all I do is build, it works just fine. The problem arises when I try and do a release, dry run or regular. It consistently fails with the Cannot prepare the release because you have local modifications error. I have wiped out the workspace, but the problem persists. Is there any way I can get Maven to tell me which file it thinks has been modified? I would assume that by wiping out the local workspace and immediately running the dry run release that there wouldn't be any opportunity for anything to get modified.
Please note, I do not have access to the Jenkins server or the slave that is running the actual release build, so I can't use any tools there (like SVN) to determine what is supposedly modified.
You can use the Maven SCM plugin to do a diff.
https://maven.apache.org/scm/maven-scm-plugin/diff-mojo.html
Basically, integrate the maven plugin upstream of the failure, and see if anything has been changed. I imagine you might be able to see the output in the log, but if you cannot, you might be able to move your "real" maven pom.xml aside and replace it with one that generates a diff file and with the help of the maven build helper plugin, attaches that file as an additional aritfact (to a pom target).
It turned out the solution to my problem was to not use the "Local to the workspace" strategy for my private Maven repository in the Jenkins job configuration. By changing that to the "Local to the executor" strategy the problem went away. I'm still not sure why it was having the problem in the workspace, but this solution resolved it form me, and might work for others.

incremental builds in Xcode server

I'm using Xcode server for CI and want to do git pull instead of always clone. Can you do that?
i tried the "clean" option in the bot settings; but, it still seem to clone the entire repo every time.
I struggled with it for quite some time too.
This may help : http://matt.vlasach.com/xcode-bots-hosted-git-repositories-and-automated-testflight-builds/

How can I override the <default> branch name in TeamCity 7.1 using Git branching support?

I've got a CI build pulling feature branches from Github and building/packaging them into a local folder, using a folder naming convention based on the project, branch and build number.
For named branches (feature1, feature2) this is working great.
The problem is that when I do a commit to the master, TeamCity exposes teamcity.build.branch as <default> - which means when the build step expands
E:\Packages\MyProject\%teamcity.build.branch%\
it's ending up with E:\Packages\MyProject\<default> - which is then crashing the build step because it isn't a valid Windows path.
I can see the master branch name in the fully-qualified build parameter:
teamcity.build.branch <default>
teamcity.build.checkoutDir C:\TeamCity\BuildAgents\agent-mulder\work\2151838a7933464d
teamcity.build.default.checkoutDir 2151838a7933464d
teamcity.build.id 16347
teamcity.build.vcs.branch.github_myproject refs/heads/master
but ideally I need to get master as the teamcity.build.branch for use in my build steps.
Can I transform the parameter at runtime? Override the behaviour? I've even tried setting the VCS branch name to DO_NOT_USE in the hope that "master" would no longer match the default - but this doesn't appear to work either.
In teamcity 7 its simply %vcsroot.branch%
that returns develop.
In my case I have
%MajorVersion%.%MinorVersion%.%PatchVersion%-%vcsroot.branch%
Which are all set in build parameters.
The number format is %BuildFormatSemVer% which is the stuff above and . {0}
%BuildFormatSemVer%.{0}
Which returns
#1.0.0-develop.4
Not ideal, but I was able to work around it by creating a new branch in git named "teamcity" and setting that as the default branch in TeamCity, it seems to require that the branch actually exist, since it worked when I created the branch, but didn't when you just entered a fake name.
Hopefully they actually fix this, because this is definitely a hack.
We have run into this problem several times when creating pipelines. It is the most visible when trying to automatically build feature and release branches using the Gitflow workflow. What we've been able to do was to use teamcity.build.vcs.branch.github_myproject and a regular expression in sed to sanitize the string whenever we wish to use it. This is mainly to watermark artifacts for debugging purposes.
The larger issue, at least for us, is that the TeamCity 7.1.1 version does not automatically fire off dependency builds for anything that isn't the default build in the VCS root. Obviously this is a huge pain point as we're now going to have to click manually in the tool. We haven't yet figured out a clean way to get around this other than hooks in git which use the HTTP API to call out to the proper build step.
I don't know if this was previously answered, or is any longer relevant.
In TeamCity 10.0.2 create a custom parameter such as %Git.Reference%. If you require a pull (or push) from TC to git, set this to "ref/head/Dev" or "ref/Head/yourbranch". Use this in your 'VCS root' reference.

Run command before pulling from SVN in TeamCity

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.

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