TeamCity dependency without copying files?

Question

Is there a way to have the artifacts of a TeamCity build referenced (but not copied) as a dependency for another TeamCity build?

Some background: I've been trying to reduce the build times in a couple of our TeamCity configurations. It's a c++ program that depends on several 3rd party libraries, which our Sys Admin has been loathe to install on the build machine.

Our first run had the libraries zipped up and uncompressed / compiled as a build step within the configurations. This takes a while, so the Sys Admin auggested moving the 3rd party lib decompression / compilation into a separate configuration and setting the artifacts of that build as a dependency for the build I'm trying to speed up.

Things are worse under this build configuration, however. The size of the expanded / compiled 3rd party libs (over 1GB) actually makes the original configuration speedier by over 10 minutes. If there was a way to just reference the artifact directory without copying stuff over, that would be fantastic.

Answer 1

Do not use artefact dependencies.

Instead create two or more build configurations (one for your main application, one or more for the 3rd party libraries) then create snapshot dependencies between them, configuring it to Run build on the same agent.

Doing this will ensure the binaries from your 3rd party libraries are always available on the local file system and always up-to-date (yet without being constantly rebuilt - assuming no source changes).

You should be able to locate the 3rd party binaries easy enough in the checkout directory.

The reason artefacts are slow is they get uploaded to the central central server, then downloaded by agents. Obviously not a good fit for a 1GB of 3rd party libraries.

Answer 2

As far as I know there is no way to prevent artifact copy from server to agent: it will be impossible for the compiler / linker to find dependencies...

In my opinion you can take the best of both configurations by publishing zipped artifacts (just postpone a ".zip" to the destination path) and fetching them from "last successful build".

This way you will trigger the lib recompile only on respective source code changes (decreasing overall build time) and artifacts will be transferred as a compressed archive (decreased transfer time).

Maybe you can optimize further by building each lib separately from others: only libs with pending changes will be recompiled.