Calcutta EAP, build 7601

We've just uploaded a new EAP and you can start downloading it :)

The Change Log page pretty much says it all.

A couple of "undocumented" notes, though.

The build has enabled "Agents Statistics Table" tab. Look for one more tab under Agents. It is designed to help TeamCity administrators understand how the load is spread across agents and build configurations.

Actually, the tab was included but turned off for quite a while already. It still needs a lot of polishing, but hopefully we will be able to improve it till the release. Is it helpful? What are your thoughts?

Also, the new search can in fact search for more information that is configured by default. For those of you brave enough, you can try to add test names into the search index by adding -Dtc.search.index.tests=true JVM option to the TeamCity server. If you have many builds/tests and the database is not quick enough, this can cause 100% CPU load for quite a long time after the server start, so use with caution. You can track progress of the indexing on the separate search results page.

As always, your feedback is highly appreciated.

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...

TeamCity 3.1.2 Release is out

We've uploaded 3.1.2 release on our official download site at jetbrains.com.

This release build number is 6881. We've uploaded 6878 build yesterday, but quickly after that (thanks to one of our attentive users) a problem has been found with connections to Subversion with "svn+ssh" protocol. It turned out we forget to add one of the jars of SVNKit library that we use to access Subversion repositories. A new build with the problem fixed has been uploaded just several minutes ago.

Enjoy!

P.S. If you are already use one of Calcutta EAP builds, just stay tuned. In a week or a bit more we will release a next EAP build with more features included!

Mercurial SCM Support in TeamCity

Among new stable release we prepared another good plugin for you. This plugin adds support for wonderful SCM system - Mercurial. The plugin supports:
* changes collecting
* checkout on server mode
* obtaining files content (allows to view diffs on files)
* checkout rules

Plugin does not support:
* remote run (requires corresponding support in IDE)
* checkout on agent (this feature is in progress)

The plugin works with 3.1.x and 4 EAP releases.

You can get the latest version of the plugin from teamcity.jetbrains.com

There you will find two zip files:
* mercurial-server.zip
* mercurial-src.zip

First zip contains jar files that should be moved to the WEB-INF/lib directory of the TeamCity 3.1.x server. If you need to install plugin under the TeamCity 4.x you can put the whole zip into the .BuildServer/plugins folder. After that restart your server.

Second zip contains full source code of the plugin available under the terms of Apache license 2.0 (you can also obtain source code of the plugin from the mercurial repository: http://hg.jetbrains.org/hg/mercurial/ where it actually reside).

We hope that source code will help us to catch bugs in the plugin faster and will be a good reference for our plugin writers.

Happy building!

Update: Current information on the plugin can be found on the plugin page.

TeamCity 3.1.2 Release Candidate

Since the 3.1.1 release, thanks to our users, we discovered and fixed some bugs in the code. The most critical ones were integrated into 3.1.x branch and now it's time to release the fixes as 3.1.2 release.

Before the release we would want to check that the fixes really work and no new ones were introduced, hence the 3.1.2 release candidate.

In this release we have included:

• reworked clean checkout for VSS which now uses native client instead of glitchy VSS API;
• reworked build stopping logic under Linux platforms: we no longer use JNI (to find out the PID of the current process), but some command-line magic;
• reworked database migration tool. OutOfMemory error on large databases is (hopefully) fixed now, as well as data truncation errors. Also, detailed progress reporting is implemented which is really useful when migrating large setups.

  Nevertheless, for a production use please consider migrating to one of supported external databases as soon as possible;

• fixed security issue when a user watching "All Projects" may receive notification for a project he/she does not have access to;
• miscellaneous fixes in CVS and StarTeam support, other issues.

So, if you are still using TeamCity 3.1.1 or earlier and did not upgrade to Calcutta EAP, please try this release candidate build.

Those using the 4.x branch EAP does not have the option to try this build because the TeamCity data directory was already upgraded to a newer format and it cannot be downgraded. On the other hand, most of the fixes were already available in the latest Calcutta EAP and the most recent ones will be available in the next.

PS
While preparing the release notes for this release candidate I approached the team developing our home-grown issue tracker with a reminder that the tracker still has no way to make an external link to a shared folder like "3.1.2 fixes". 30 minutes later we already had the new version of the tracker deployed with the feature added. "Wow", said I and grabbed the link for the 3.1.2 fixes.
Not having the feature beforehand is the cost, but ability to have a feature added in the matter of minutes is the benefit of using in-house developed solutions.

TeamCity and Mono

Do you use Mono with TeamCity. Please describe some use cases or cases you wish to implement with TeamCity and Mono.

Please vote for Mono support issue in our tracker at http://www.jetbrains.net/tracker/issue/TW-5425

Calcutta EAP, build 7385

I also think that two months is a too large period between EAPs.

But here it is, to your pleasure.

• personal builds can be targeted to a specific build agent
  
• Ability to redefine certain build parameters on manual build run
  
• Risk tests reordering support for NUnit
  
• IntelliJ IDEA 8 (Diana) is used to collect inspections and find duplicates
  
• IntelliJ IDEA 8 (Diana) project file format is supported in Ipr runner, Inspections and Duplicate runners.
  
• Reworked plugin packaging (plugin writers, take a look!)
  
• Ability to configure charts on Project home page (Statistics tab)
  
• Custom artifacts-based tab on the Project page
  
• more features and details (with screenshots)
  

Much of the work done in this EAP build is not visible in UI, since we're working on composed builds/history builds feature and didn't manage to make it testable by the public. Yet.

Download and don't forget to backup before installing. Would you help us test it?

Kind regards,
KIR