Upgrade button

You probably have seen this illustration before. This is Baron Münchhausen pulling himself and his horse up from the swamp by his own hair. I think this image is the best illustration of our own TeamCity server upgrade process.

What I mean is that TeamCity server we are using at JetBrains to build our projects now is able to upgrade itself... We even have a button in the TeamCity UI which starts the upgrade process. Interested? Well, you can do the same in your testing environment.

First of all we've installed build agent on the same server where TeamCity is running. For security purposes this agent is configured to run one build configuration only (let's call it Upgrade).

Artifact dependencies in the Upgrade configuration were configured to download the artifacts produced by the build that assembles TeamCity installer.

Then we created a build.xml script which unpacks these artifacts, stops the server, backups the previous installation and installs new files. The script is very simple since it is running on the same PC where the server is installed. Finally, the script starts our TeamCity server again. Since all of this is done by the build agent running in a separate process the server can be safely restarted. Agent waits till the server is up again, sends the produced build log and finishes the build.

And now to upgrade our server we just need to click on the "Run" button:



However there is still one significant limitation: we can't choose which build to install. To do that we have to change the build configuration settings (artifact dependencies) every time we want to upgrade, which is not convenient.

Fortunately there is a solution. If you are using TeamCity 4.0 EAP, you are probably aware of the new "Run custom build" feature. Since the last EAP we've improved it a lot. In brief this feature allows you to specify values of build parameters when you click "Run" button. To solve our problem we decided to add one small improvement: we allowed to specify build parameters references in the artifact dependencies build number:



And here is our "Run custom build" dialog where this parameter value can be specified:



Do you remember that TeamCity allows to publish artifacts in parallel with a build itself? This means that in this dialog you can specify build number of a running build too. Think about it, Münchhausen didn't lie...