In my CruiseControl instances, I have version controlled the ccnet.config file.
When I want to update CruiseControl, I run an "update config" job which fetches the config from version control.
In this manner, the very build process of a release is configuration managed.
I am wondering how to achieve these goals effectively under TeamCity.
I try to keep what ever CI I am using as light as possible and put as much of the running of the build into an msbuild or nant script including running tests, code coverage, etc.
The benefit of this is:
The build file is version controlled.
You can run the script in any environment.
Easier to move between CI environments.
Everyone becomes responsible for the build.
This has been introduced in TeamCity 9. Also answered in another post:
Version control (e.g. in TFS) build configuration for TeamCity - is it possible?
I've been wanting a way to source control TeamCity config for a long time. I ended up writing a Windows Service which monitors the configuration directory and commits changes to git.
The project is on GitHub: https://github.com/grenade/teamcity-config-monitor
You might try looking at the folders that are backed up prior to upgrade (or when restoring team city) as those represent the configurations and changes you've made since initial installation.
http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/TCD4/TeamCity+Data+Backup
Some of the relevant data is actually a database, (and in fact the documentation advises you to point team city to a real database like mysql instead of the default embedded database it uses)
You could try checking those into SVN, but you'll want to stop team city for any check-in actions.
Related
TeamCity appears to store the definitions for builds, projects, templates etc as XML internally.
This is exposed in the "Administration > Audit" view where you can see diffs that people made to individual configurations, at URLs like http://teamcityserver/admin/settingsDiffView.html?id=project:project10&versionBefore=8&versionAfter=9&actionId=3151
I'd like to manage a TeamCity setup partially from outside the web interface - e.g. for example keep the build definitions in version control and perhaps programmatically generate them.
Is there any way I can directly upload definitions in this format (or any similar alternative)? I'm aware that there are various APIs and extension points to TeamCity but haven't managed to find any that gives direct access to anything like this.
I can live with the format changing with TeamCity versions if necessary - it would be a reasonable price to pay for the other benefits.
For TeamCity 9.x and newer
As reported by Ganesh in the comments to this answer, an option was added in 9.x that supports changes and versioning through Source Code Management (SCM) tools. Please see his answer for 9.x and beyond.
For TeamCity 8.x and older
It might not be the "approved" way, but you can edit the project files on disk, and those changes will appear in your build configs. I have successfully edited them outside of the Web UI after they were created.
So, you could probably open that folder up as a restricted network share or set up ssh.
You'll find it at $TeamCityData/config/projects/ and then they are stored in subfolders such as $projectName/buildTypes/$buildFile.xml
An example is:
E:\TeamCityData\config\projects\CSandbox\buildTypes\CSandbox_Project1TrunkBuildUnitTest.xml
TeamCity 9 adds a new "Versioned Settings" feature which keeps these XML files under version control and allows changes to be made via the VCS.
In TeamCity 9.0 this can be git or mercurial, and the upcoming TeamCity 9.1 will add support for Perforce and Subversion.
I've been using it with git for a few months and it works quite nicely in practice.
I sometimes have trouble persuading TeamCity to notice changes coming in from the VCS - particularly when deleting projects - but otherwise it's been really useful for standardising configuration and spinning up new job chains quickly.
Another slight annoyance is that you can't configure the location within the repository that the settings come from - it's always .teamcity in the root - so I've had to use multiple branches or repositories to manage multiple TeamCity servers.
I am setting up a CruiseControl.Net server. So far, it only builds a project (.Net website), and I kind-of know how to set up unit testing, code coverage, etc in the future.
What I will need to have soon is this:
The developers commit changes to SVN continually, thus CCNet builds often.
CCNet will publish the latest version to the development server, as soon as a commit is validated (with unit tests etc).
The project manager validates a specific version, in order to publish it to the pre-production server, and create a SVN tag from this revision.
The last point is where my problem lies: how exactly can I set up things so the project manager can, for instance, browse to the CCNet web dashboard, select a previous specific build, and says "this is the build I want to publish" ?
I believe that my thinking is flawed somewhere, but I can't put my finger on it. Maybe CCNet is not the right place to do these manipulations ?
In my mind, I can create a SVN tag using CCNet, and mostly work from the trunk, but maybe I can't ? Maybe it's the other way around, and I should add a CCNet project every time a tag is created under SVN ?
The final goal is that I want to automate the publication process: zip creation (for archiving), web.config modification (using Nant for instance), and website publication (using FTP).
In all these steps, I want to limit the manual intervention to the maximum. If I can avoid to add a new project to CCNet every time a tag or branch is created in SVN, that would be awesome.
Thanks for your help, and sorry if it's not very easy to read, but it's not very clear in my head either...
Since you can create any task, you should be able to achieve the goal, though unfortunately not out-of-the-box.
Since you use SVN, it all depends actually on revision. I think I'd create a separate project for your third scenario and added a parameter where PM would provide revision number. Then based on that I'd tag sources etc. in my own task.
Regarding the other points, I think this is similar. Recently for web projects we started using MSDeploy, and in each stage build the MSDeploy package was created. Then there was a separate build called Deploy, that when forced allows us to select which package we want to deploy using MSDeploy.
Having several environments, however, started a little bit like overkill for managing with CCNet, and I'll be looking into kwakee at some time.
I'm stuck working with VS2005 and VSS for some of the code that I'm working on. Are there any scripts that let me commit all modified source files to VSS and make VSS push out a patch to our QA servers?
Thanks,
Teja.
Have you considered CruiseControl.NET to manage your build and drop?
It sounds like you wanted a bit extra ("scripts...commit all modified source files"), but CC.NET will take care of building/reporting/deploying. It's not clear from your question where the commits will be coming from (a developer machine, somewhere else), or why automated check-ins are useful. In other words, shouldn't developers be purposefully committing code changes?
How to Setup CruiseControl.NET.
Sounds like you're looking for a Continuous Integration server, which allows you to run build scripts after detecting changes in source control. Try TeamCity or CruiseControl.NET.
Here's a walk through that details the setup process for CI with TeamCity and Subversion. You can add additional scripts for deployment via MSBuild or any command line tool.
We have a continuous integration server with over 40 jobs that are constantly changing. I would like to version control continuous integration build jobs in Hudson so we can roll back changes if we have problems.
Is there a Hudson plugin that will do this or other solution that already exists or should I keep the config.xml files in SVN.
Hudson Labs has a really great write up on this, Keeping your configuration and data in Subversion
This is the first bit of the article
We all know that keeping important
files in version control is critical,
as it ensures problematic changes can
be reverted and can serve as a backup
mechanism as well. Code and resources
are often kept in version control, but
it can be easy to forget your
continuous integration (CI) server
itself! If a disk were to die or fall
victim to a misplaced rm -rf, you
could lose all the history and
configuration associated with the jobs
your CI server manages.
It’s pretty simple to create a
repository, but it isn’t obvious which
parts of your $HUDSON_HOME you’ll want
to backup. You’ll also want to have
some automation so new projects get
added to the repository, and deleted
ones get removed. Luckily we have a
great tool to handle this: Hudson!
We have a Hudson job which runs
nightly, performs the appropriate SVN
commands, and checks in
You only seem to be interested in the configuration, which is fine, just ignore or filter out the bits about the data and focus on the configuration.
This is one of the more recent threads about using version control with Hudson's configuration on the Hudson users list.
There are no plugins to do store configuration in an SCM right now (March 2010) though the backup plugin might do something close to what you want, but perhaps with less of a view of 'change' and more of just a snapshot at any given time.
The relatively new Job Config History plugin gets part of the way there - it doesn't actually store the configurations in source control, but it does provide history and auditing of changes to jobs.
You could look into the SCM Sync configuration plugin.
It automatically commits all of your jenkins config changes to svn. that way you can track configuration errors easily.
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/SCM+Sync+configuration+plugin
We're currently using CruiseControl.NET as a continuous integration server for a number of ASP.NET web projects, but we're also evaluating TeamCity.
This is working great for our build server.
What we'd like to setup is a customer facing test server. I'm thinking that when we are happy for our latest development version to be released to the client for test, we could label it in SVN.
I'd then like a second build server to build this version ready for the client to see.
The question is this - is there any way to get either CruiseControl.NET or TeamCity to build only the latest labelled version of the code in a repository?
If anyone has any alternative suggestions, that'd also be greatly appreciated!
You could have a designated location or branch in your subversion repository e.g. \release then point the second TeamCity build server at that.
When your are happy with trunk then overwrite the existing location. The second build server will pick this up, build it, and even deploy it to a test server.
I don't think there's a way to do this directly in TeamCity. You can however configure your build trigger to filter on files and/or users. So, if you touch a given file to indicate release status in addition to or rather than labelling, you can use that.
The trigger filter could be, for example (untested):
+:/ReleaseVersion.cs