Custom TeamCity plugin is uploaded but doesn't seem to get executed - plugins

Question

I'm developing a TeamCity plugin and I fail to even get it executed by TeamCity.
I upload the zip file with the plugin and restart TeamCity, then I can see the plugin on the list of external plugins, it also gets unpacked into .BuildServer/plugins/.unpacked but other than that nothing happens.
It doesn't seem that the plugin is running. (I don't even see the plugin name in any logfile)
My simplest attempt was to just create a plugin from maven archetype:
mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeRepository=http://download.jetbrains.com/teamcity-repository -DarchetypeArtifactId=teamcity-server-plugin -DarchetypeGroupId=org.jetbrains.teamcity.archetypes -DarchetypeVersion=RELEASE
and then only add some logging:
package com.example.plugin;
import jetbrains.buildServer.log.Loggers;
public class AppServer {
public void run() {
Loggers.SERVER.info("I'm running");
}
}
and create the necessary bean with init method:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd"
default-autowire="constructor">
<bean id="appServer" class="com.example.plugin.AppServer" init-method="run"/>
</beans>
I upload the plugin, restart TeamCity but the log message from AppServer does not appear in any logfile.
What am I missing? How to log this message?

Answer 1

I would expect to see an exception (plus a stacktrace) in the teamcity-server.log file. Are you sure you checked that file?
The behaviour you're describing can be symptomatic of you having built the plugin with a JDK version incompatible with TeamCity's JRE. For example, you build your plugin with Java 8 but your TeamCity is running under Java 7. In that case, the plugin will be detected (as it is in your case) but will crash when TC tries to invoke it.