JetBrains TeamCity Blog

Dear Friends,

As you know, we’re a company of software products. 14 are already known to the wider audience, and more are to come sooner or later.

But a company isn’t just what we develop. It’s also who we are, what we’re passionate about, what inspires us, and what we believe in. We decided to share these essential parts of our world called JetBrains with you – in the JetBrains Company Blog. In fact, it’s been in the works for quite some time and is finally coming to life.
Check in often to get to know us better – the people, the events, the hobbies, the beliefs, the anecdotes and the pure facts – everything behind the tools that we make for you.

Don’t miss our Interview with JetBrains’ John Lindquist, already published on the blog.

Stay tuned for more news and keep developing with pleasure!

Your TeamCity Team

We’re happy to tell you that TeamCity 7.1 is officially released! If you were following the early access program, you may have noticed that in this release we were mostly focusing on enhancing support for distributed version control systems, such as Git and Mercurial, making the daily work with branches smooth, clear and easy. So give a warm welcome to Feature Branches in TeamCity and check them out!

As you know, Feature Branches in DVCSs like Git and Mercurial allow you to work on a feature independently from the repository and commit all the changes for the feature onto the branch, merging the changes back when your feature is complete. This approach brings a number of advantages to software development teams, however in continuous integration servers that do not have dedicated support for it, it also causes a number of problems, like constant build configurations duplication, poor visibility and in the end loss of control of the process.
Our main idea was to make development and building in branches as simple as possible. Ideally, all you would have to do is to push your branch to a Git or Mercurial repository and TeamCity would detect it and start a build on your changes. And this is how it actually works in TeamCity 7.1! You need to make only one tiny change in your build configuration – let TeamCity know which branches you want it to monitor.
So, here are some highlights:

• Once a change is detected in a branch, TeamCity will start a build in this branch.
• All the builds from branches are marked with branch labels to distinguish them from one another.
  
• In various places in TeamCity UI you can filter builds by branch label: filter all build configurations of a single project, or history, change log, issue log and pending changes for a specific build configuration.
  
• Get a bird’s-eye view on the status of active branches in a build configuration on the dedicated page.
• Run custom builds for specific branches.
• Use all regular TeamCity smart features such as quiet period, per-checkin triggering, dependencies, notifications, new failing tests detection, and so on with DVCS branches!

There’s a lot more to this huge feature, because it relates to many aspects of continuous integration experience, so please make sure to read the release notes to get the full taste of all the goodies we brought to you in this build.

In addition to all that we have also made a number of improvements in different areas:

• Current problems are now shown for collapsed configurations.
• Sticky investigation: the right way to investigate flickering tests.
• Version Control Repository browser: use a tree view to choose a file in the repository instead of typing or pasting the path.
• NTLM HTTP authentication is supported.
• Manually mark build as successful or failed.
• More options to control build steps execution.
• Checkout on label in Perforce integration.
• Bundled Xcode runner.
• Amazon EC2 EBS-based instances support.
• and much more….

Download TeamCity 7.1.

Enjoy!

Hi everyone!
We’re already counting the days till the final TeamCity 7.1 release, and today we have a fresh new EAP build for you which is basically what the release build is going to be like, except we still need to polish a few things. So we encourage you to try it, and help us improve it!

Check out the release notes, which is all about bug-fixes now, try the build out and send us some feedback!

Stay tuned, we’re almost there!

Today’s EAP build is all about significant improvements in Feature Branches support. Since the release date approaches, we’re focusing on polishing already introduced features and fixing known issues. Here’s what we have for you this time:

• Extended branches specification syntax: When you describe branch specification, you now have more control on what will be shown as a branch label in TeamCity UI. For instance, type something like this:
  +:refs/heads/release-(7.0)
+:refs/heads/release-(7.1)
  TeamCity will use label 7.0 for builds from refs/heads/release-7.0 branch and 7.1 for builds from refs/heads/release-7.1.
• Branch labels for builds from default branch: Now builds from default branch also get labels.
• Branch selector on overview and project page: We’ve added an ability to switch between branches to both Overview and Project pages.
  
• Branches tab in build configuration: Want to see an overview of what is going on in each active branch? There is a new build configuration tab to answer exactly this question:
  
• VCS branch parameter: For Git & Mercurial TeamCity provides additional build parameters with names of VCS branch used by the build on the moment of starting.

See the complete release notes, back up your TeamCity instance, try the build and share your feedback with us!

Stay tuned!

One more bug-fix update is available – TeamCity 7.0.4. This build comes with a number of general fixes, addresses a few performance issues, and additionally introduces one small feature – an ability to fail a build based on statements from dotCover coverage with “Fail build on metric” build failure condition (TW-21111).

To see the complete list of fixed issues, please refer to the release notes.
Download the build and share your feedback with us.
Enjoy!

Hi everyone!
Today we have a new TeamCity EAP build for you, and right now there are just a few weeks left till the official release, so this build is basically almost “the one”, except that “the one” will be more polished. So if you’re eager to be the first one to put your hands on TeamCity 7.1, this build is just for you. Let’s see what’s in it!

Feature Branches

If you have been following our EAP program, you probably noticed some sprouts of this feature, but now it has grown and expanded and you can already harvest lots of goodies out of it!
First of all, now you can configure what branches you want to monitor in a build configurations right in the VCS root (Git and Mercurial only), just use syntax similar to checkout rules:

Use * to list the branches. For example, +:refs/heads/* will match refs/heads/feature1 branch, and in TeamCity interface you’ll see feature1 only as a branch name.
Once you’ve specified the branches, TeamCity will start to monitor them for changes, and if you have VCS trigger and a change is found in some branch, TeamCity will trigger a build in this branch.
You’ll also be able to filter history, change log, pending changes and issue log by branch name. Also branch names will appear in custom build dialog, so you’ll be able to manually trigger a custom build on a branch too.
But that is just a tip of an iceberg! There’s more to it! This feature affects many aspects of TeamCity behavior: for the details please refer to the release notes.

Other Improvements

Unified look for Change Log, Pending and build Changes pages

We have reworked Pending and build Changes views to look similar to Changelog, for instance, you’ll find graph of commits on the build Changes page as well. You can also notice a new option “Show files” which allows to easily expand all changes on the current page and show affected files.

Manually changing build status

Sometimes you may need to mark a failed build as successful, for example, if a failure happened because of a minor problem, and you want other builds to take artifacts of this build, or your want to promote this build further by pipeline. On the other hand, there are cases when TeamCity was not able to determine build failure. For example, build finished successfully but because of an error in build script it did not produce any artifacts. So the build clearly cannot be treated as successful. Now you can change the build status manually, provided you have enough permissions to do that.

Build Steps Execution

Build step execution policies introduced in the previous EAP have been improved. We’ve added “Always, even if build stop command was issued” option to “Execute step if” drop-down which can be useful for some cleanup tasks. Note that as in previous TeamCity version whether the step is failed or not in most of the cases is determined by process exit code.

NuGet Support Improvements

• We added support of NuGet 1.8/2.0. Now you may even upload your own NuGet.CommandLine package instead of downloading it from the public feed.
• NuGet Trigger now supports Prerelease packages.
• We improved NuGet Installer runner. It no longer requires you to have packages/repository.config file under solution. Starting from this release, NuGet Installer uses Visual Studio solution file (.sln) to create the full list of NuGet packages to install. It also supports Solution-Wide packages, from .NuGet/packages.config file. We added an option on how packages upgrade is done. Now you may select to update packages for entire solution of per packages.config files.

See the complete release notes, back up your TeamCity instance, try the build and share your feedback with us!

Stay tuned!

New TeamCity EAP build (#23373) is available today. Be the first one to try it! Here’s what we’ve got for you this time:

• NTLM HTTP authentication support: You’ve waited for this feature quite a while, and now the related issue (TW-6885) is finally closed!
• Changes from artifact dependencies: Changes in artifact dependencies are now reported in the way similar to VCS changes.
  
• Branches improvements: Not only TeamCity displays branches names now, but you can also filter shown builds, changes and issues by specific branch.
• Support for Amazon EC2 EBS instances: New EC2 instance types are now supported, plus it is now possible to specify the Amazon Instance ID instead of Image ID to make TeamCity start/stop the instance as if it was an image.
• More flexible build steps configuration: Previously, if your build consisted of several steps, TeamCity would stop executing build steps if a non-zero exit code was returned from the previous step. Now you can change this behavior, and tell TeamCity to continue executing build steps anyway.
• Support for .rvmrc in “Ruby environment configurator” build feature: Ruby Environment Configurator build feature is now able to configure environment for the subsequent build steps from the .rvmrc file. (See TW-14493)
• Checkout on label in Perforce integration: In Perforce VCS root settings you can now specify label to be used to checkout sources. If you change it for the VCS root, the next build with changed label will show the changes since previously labeled build.

See the complete release notes, back up your TeamCity instance, try the build and share your feedback with us!

Enjoy!

The release of TeamCity 7.1 is so far planned for mid-June, and today we launch the early access program, so don’t sit on your hands – grab the first EAP build while it’s hot! Today’s menu includes:

Current problems: now on Overview page

If you need to monitor problems in many build configurations, you can now get the whole picture right on the overview page without having to expand each and every build configuration in question:

Sticky investigations

Normally an investigation assigned for a build configuration or a test is automatically cleared once the build configuration becomes green or the test passes. What if it’s a “flickering” test: green-red-green-red… and so on? Still has to be investigated! To allow better management of such problems we introduced manual mode for investigation resolving. When you assign an investigation you can select how you want it to be resolved: automatically, or manually:

Version Control Repository browser

In several places in build step settings, where a path to a build script can be specified, a small icon appeared: . By clicking on this icon you’ll be presented with a VCS repository browser allowing you to choose a file in repository.

And more!

• Own investigation highlighting
• Branch names are shown for builds triggered by Remote Run on branch trigger
• Fixed clean checkout issue for builds from branches
• IntelliJ IDEA plugin improvements
• Brand new service implementation for TeamCity server (be careful, there can be bugs)

Find the details in the complete release notes, try the build and share your feedback with us!
Enjoy!

New bug-fix update for TeamCity is now available – TeamCity 7.0.2, build #21349.

The build addresses important performance and memory issues actual for installations with big number of build configurations; it also addresses performance of agent-side Subversion checkout in 1.7 format. The issue with recent builds not shown on the overview page is fixed in this build too.

You can find a number of other substantial fixes in the complete release notes.

Download the build and share your feedback with us.

Enjoy!

Bug-fix update for TeamCity is now available. This build comes with tuned performance and addresses a number of problems of different importance.
As usual we recommend everyone to upgrade to the new build. You can find the complete list of changes in release notes.

Download the build and share your feedback with us.

Happy building!