Accessing TeamCity artifacts in Build Step

Question

I have been playing around with TeamCity to get a CI environment up and running.

I started by following Troy Hunt's 'You're deploying wrong', which was very useful, however I wanted to split the packaging and deployment into 2 seperate steps, for the following reasons:

1. I wanted to pass some additional flags to msdeploy, which isnt possible (to m,y knowledge) by using the MSBuild Package and Deploy that Troy describes.
2. I can easily disable the Second Build Step i.e. deployment, if I ever need to build the package but not deploy it.
3. I wanted to use the -skip flag on msdeploy to prevent it from deleting certain folders, which again I couldn't find any method of doing without passing as an argument to the command line.

So, in my first MSBuild step I just have the parameters:

/P:Configuration=%env.Configuration%
/P:VisualStudioVersion=11.0
/P:IgnoreDeployManagedRuntimeVersion=True

And then I have a second Build Step that uses a command line build runner to execute the following msdeploy command:

"C:\Program Files\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy V3\msdeploy.exe" -verb:sync       -source:package="C:\ProgramData\JetBrains\TeamCity\system\artifacts\MyProject\%system.teamcity.buildConfName%\%teamcity.build.id%\MyProject.Web.csproj.zip"   -dest:auto,ComputerName='https://devserver:8172/msdeploy.axd?site=MyWebsite',UserName='domain\username',Password='password',IncludeAcls='False',AuthType='Basic' -skip:objectName=dirPath,absolutePath=media$ -disableLink:AppPoolExtension -disableLink:ContentExtension   -disableLink:CertificateExtension -retryAttempts=2 -allowuntrusted

The problem with this is that apparently TeamCity doesnt publish the artifacts until all the build steps are complete, so therefore the Command Line process fails because the package zip file doesnt actually exist at that point.

I have read something about publishing artifacts whilst the Build is still in progress but that does seem like a bit of a hack.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You would be better have two builds vs two build steps.

The first (Build A) would have 1 build step that would do the building then the second (Build B) would just do the deployment in one build step using the artifacts from the first.

So under the first configuration tab of build A, you would specify the artifacts that would need to be made available from the first build. You can then run the build and confirm that under the artifacts section everything you need is available. (These will show when build A has completed running).

Then under the dependencies section (Can't remember the exact name, and I'm away from my TC instance) of Build B you can set it up to use the artifacts of build A which would then be used for the deployment.

Once you have all that working, you could add a build trigger to have Build B run after a successfull execution of Build A, then if you at one point just wanted to run Build A, disable the trigger on build B or pause the Build B configuration which will stop the trigger from firing.