I'd like to check in assemblies to TFS source control after successful project build on TeamCity. Are there any elegant and easy way to do that?
I can create a command line step and run tf.exe with parameters, but then I need to provide credentials to connect to TFS, map the directories and finally do the check in.
The second option is to set up the powershell step, and use one of the cmdlets, but this requires installation of cmdlets on the build machine which I don't want to do.
Have you got any experience in such case? Maybe I can use the credentials used by TeamCity to get the sources, and do not map the directories but use the downloaded structure / sources?
This answers your question but it is not normally a good idea to commit binaries to your source control. You have a couple of choices.
Create a nuget package manually:Nuget Packages can be stored in a
shared folder. You can manually create a package in 5 minutes.
If your other projects are built using teamcity, check out artifact
dependencies in teamcity.
TF.exe commandline tool is the best feasible option for this scenario.
Related
I am using VSTS for my OPA5 Tests, so all works for one project. For this I created a Build for these Projects i wanted to test.
But if I want to test all projects, do I need to create a build for all Project or is there a solution to build all projects with one build definition?
The build should do always the same things, saved in a YAML File.
I have seen thats is possible to do builds with difficult branches but not with difficult repositories.
So has anyone a solution for this or is it impossible at the moment?
Yes, it's possible.
You just need to clone another git repositories at the beginning of the build.
So you can add a PowerShell task as the first task and execute git clone command.
And If you are using YAML file, just add the script to execute the PowerShell task.
Besides, you can also refer the post VSTS build from multiple repositories.
We are using VSTS for CI and CD in my team, we got over 40 repositories which are separated projects. but all of them have to run the same PowerShell script in one of their Build steps.
the PowerShell file is bigger too big to be kept as the inline script, so we need to save it inside a file. obviously, I got a copy of the PowerShell file in each repository.
Problem:
Now whenever I need to update the script, then I end up to update it in every repository, which is over 40 at the moment.
I think there should be a better approach. Is there any way that I can put my script in one single repo (a repo dedicated to holding the script) then I use it within each build, therefore we I need to update it I only need to update it once.
There are a few options.
My general recommendation is to publish the script as a package (NuGet or otherwise) and restore it during your application builds. This allows consumers to stay "pinned" to a known-good, known-working version, and update on a schedule that works for them.
Another option is to add a submodule to each repository that requires the script dependency, then initialize the submodule during the build process.
A third option is to turn the shared script into a VSTS build task or extension. This is extensively documented and easily located so I won't belabor the point by including instructions for doing that here.
You can add a git repository to store your powershell file.
Then add a build step to get you file from that repository during build and use it.
I need to execute a command line utility from a package that is downloaded as part of nuget package restore in the TFS build process.
On my local computer that is stored in c:\users\me.nuget*
I've tried every permutation of that on TFS without success. I've also tried \mydir\packages with no success as well.
The biggest problem is that I have to run the package restore step before being able to see any sort of feedback from the log. That's some slow debugging.
Any ideas? Thanks ahead.
With the latest nuget/msbuild the packages folder is held under the active user's profile directory, so an appropriate Powershell command is
Get-ChildItem $(UserProfile)\.nuget\packages
This currently evaluates on the VSTS 2017 Hosted build agent to C:\Users\VssAdministrator\.nuget\packages but by using the variable you are insulated from any changes made.
Just an addition to #Paul Hatcher's answer:
I also faced the same problem in Azure DevOps build pipeline where a specific package and nuget packages directory could not be found.
It is a Xamarin.Forms app based on a .net standard library where no packages folder exists. I later noticed in build logs that the packages are restored to nuget folder under user's profile. However this particular case is not documented on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/build/variables?view=vsts#agent-variables.
That means #Paul Hatcher's answer is also valid if you try to reference nuget package folder directly from your build pipeline. This ($(UserProfile).nuget\packages) should actually be a (standard) predefined build variable.
The Nuget package cache folder is in C:\Users\buildguest.nuget\packages, but it will be cleaned after build if you are using Hosted build server.
The simple way to verify:
Add NuGet restore or .Net Core Restore build step to restore packages
Add PowerShell build step to list files in C:\Users\buildguest.nuget\packages
Code:
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Users\buildguest\.nuget\packages
Queue build and check the PowerShell step log (the packages’ will be listed in the log)
Remove/disable NuGet restore or .Net Core Restore build step > Save build definition
Queue build
The build will be failed, because the path does not exist.
So, the packages need to be restored before build solution/project if aren’t existing. You can add packages to source control and map to build agent to deal with the issue of too long time takes to restore packages.
We've got a TeamCity (9.1) build configuration which is based on several snapshot dependencies to build correctly. I'm looking for a convenient way to provide each developer with a way to set up a proper build environment on their desktops. For this, I would like to download all the snapshot dependencies for a given build configuration from the TeamCity server onto the developer's desktop using the REST api.
I'm aware of how to access artifacts using REST. But this would address the artifacts created by a specific build configuration. I'm looking for a way to download all artifacts used by a given configuration specified by the dependencies.
There isn't an easy way to do this, however, it's not impossible. My answer is provided below followed by a possible alternate solution.
Answer:
The artifacts used by your target build are really just the artifacts that were created by its dependencies right?
I think what you are looking for is referenced here where you can query a build for all of its Snapshot Dependencies.
Once you have a list of the dependencies you would then need to query each of them for the artifacts they generated and then you could proceed to download them.
It's not the most straightforward thing and would require some slick Powershell or Python or whatever, but it is doable.
Another Idea:
Have you looked into something like Artifactory? It sounds like what you really need is a binary repository of sorts to track artifacts used, and artifacts created.
Or for small projects, you could probably get a way with just using a file share on the network where the build could "copy" to the share organizing files into "build" directories of some sort and then developers could "read" from the share.
We got a TeamCity server which produces nightly deployable builds. We want our beta tester to have access these nightly builds.
What are the best practices to do this? TeamCity Server is not public, it is in our office, so I assume best approach would be pushing artifacts via FTP or something like that.
Also I have no clue how to trigger a script when an artifact created successfully. Does TeamCity provide a way to do that?
I don't know of a way to trigger a script, but I wouldn't worry about that. You can retrieve artifacts via a URL. Depending on what makes sense for your project, you could have a script set up on a scheduler (cron or Windows Scheduling) that pulls the artifact and sends it to the FTP site for the Beta testers. You can configure it to pull only the latest successful artifact. If you set up the naming right, if the build fails they beta testers won't notice because the new build number just won't be there, no bad builds would be pushed to them.
Read the following help page from the documentation. It shows how you send commands from your build script to tell teamCity to publish the artifacts to a given path.
In TeamCity 7.0+ you can use Deployer plugin. Installation steps can be found here. It also allows to upload artifacts via SMB and SSH.
I suggest you start looking at something like (n)Ant to handle your build process. That way you can handle the entire "build artifacts" -> "publish artifacts" chain in an automated manner. These tools are dependency based, so the artifacts would only be published if the build succeeded.