Question

Having real problems creating artifacts in teamcity 6.5 (using TFS & MSBuild as the buildrunner if it makes any odds, which it probably does as any examples I find seem to use SVN…).

The Build works, so long as I enter no checkout rules.
If I understand it, I’ll need to set up some artifacts, that themselves rely on checkout rules(?).

I have two builds that are identical other than the way they are kicked off.
One is initiated on check-in
One is initiated manually from within TC. This build is the Test Build

Assembly version numbers come from a single versioninfo.cs file that is a linked file in all projects in the solution. This method is detailed here : http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/328977/The-Right-Way-to-Version-Your-Assemblies and holds the version number thus:
[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion(“9.1.0.0”)]

Ultimately, I’m unable to copy the output of the test build to another location.
As it stands, the only output of a build is in the teamcity data directory, for example :
C:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\ceaaf65dc87ff856\Project1\bin\Debug
C:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\ceaaf65dc87ff856\Project2\bin\Debug
etc

I’d like to copy the output files (exes and DLLs) to an output folder which has the build number of the build on it
For arguments sake, lets say for the version number above, this would be to
c:\BuildServer_Output\SolutionName\9.1.0.0

Currently I have not been able to create artifact paths that actually do anything – i.e. to copy anything anywhere.
For instance I have acoupe of artifact paths, but nothing ever gets put into C:\BuildServer_TestBuilds –
+:Accounts\bin\debug* => C:\BuildServer_TestBuilds
+:BackOffice\bin\debug* => C:\BuildServer_TestBuilds

Am I getting no artifacts (and my artifact paths therefore ignored) because I have no checkout rules?

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I am pretty sure artifacts and checkout rules are completely independent. Artifacts just deal with what has been built. Checkout rules tell teamcity how to react to and checkout changes in the VCS.

It looks like your artifact paths are beginning with absolute paths. I have always found it easier to use relative paths with wildcards. That way I don’t need to worry about where teamcity put the build. We use the following to get all dlls and exes to one folder

**\bin\Debug\*.*=>deploymentdir

Our build configuration page has an artifacts link and when we open it it will have things like

deploymentdir\common\bin\debug\common.dll
deploymentdir\common\bin\debug\common.pdb
deploymentdir\runner\bin\debug\runner.exe

In one of our other builds we use an msbuild script to flatten our output before putting it through the artifact process.

We do use checkout rules but we have not had to change our artifact paths to accommodate them.