I am using TFS 2010 and have a build machine that contains a single build controller running 2 agents.
I have worked out that I can assign a tag of "Nightly" to my 2nd agent and then edit the Build Definition for my Nightly Builds in TFS to only use an agent that has the tag of "Nightly".
Easy enough.
However, the issue here is that if a normal build (Such as dev/CI) came along, it could - in theory- use my nightly agent, which I don't want to happen.
I could go around all our development builds (20+) and add in a tags=normal and tag my primary build agent with normal, but this then relies on people remembering to tag up new builds in the future.
Is there a way to set up my build agent in TFS's Server Admin, so that it will ONLY run items with specific tags? Or is my "go around the houses" approach the only logical way?
Edit
I got around this in the end by making all my builds look for "matchExactly" on empty tags, which means my "nightly" tagged agent will never be used for CI.
I believe the default for build definitions says MatchExactly and has an empty Tags Filter field. This means that by default build definitions will only run on Build Agents that have ZERO tags. So the behavior you desire should be the default, when you tag your build agent with the Nightly tag, no builds will run on that agent unless somebody explicitly goes in and changes the default Agent settings for that build def.
I expect that this agent is already running on it's own server, otherwise there'd be no reason to single it out.
You could give this specific build agent it's own build controller, that way chances of a build associated to the "CI" build controller are zero. unless people chose the incorrect Build Controller for their build definition.
This way you also won't have to go about changing the current build definitions.
Related
Our team has a freestyle project in Jenkins that allows us to build with a specific TFS change set and deploy to a testing environment. Both of these options are parameterized, but recently, these parameters are no longer visible in the job history sidebar for new jobs.
We expect to see both a change set number if one is provided, but the environment is a required parameter and should always be visible. Since the parameters are visible for builds older than May 11, I thought this was adjustable at the project level and was accidently modified, but I do not see an option for this in the project. I am able to confirm that the project is still parameterized, and builds are still able to be filtered by environment:
Is there an option to adjust the visibility of these parameters in the sidebar so that they appear again for new builds, or is something else happening here?
I have a job to maven build our project, we now have one job per release version. As the number of releases grows, there are too many jobs and very hard to find the one we need.
I wonder if there is a way to launch the same job with different parameters? The problem is one job only has one workspace, so I'm not sure if it's possible?
Thanks.
Use This build is Parameterized option to build the jobs. Using this you can build the same job for different parameters. You will be asked to enter the parameter before building or you can also give a default parameter and you can have multiple parameters.
It is good the archive the artifacts which you need later.
You can also have the option keep build forever, this will keep the builds permanently Ir-respective of the number of builds to keep.
To use above option you should enable Discard old build option.
You can also link your repository directly to Jenkins which will trigger the job whenever a new commit is made to master or a new tag is created.
We are using TFS and the TFS Build Service. We are considering to migrate the Build service to Jenkins but we came across some issues. According to this site, there are some things that do not work very well with the TFS and Jenkins plugins. All of them we use a lot:
Associated Change sets – Team Build automatically associates a list of change sets that are included in the build
Associated Work Items – Team Build analysis the relationships and also associates Work Items with a build. Indeed it walks the work item tree (parent) and maintains that association in the chain.
Is this still true? We have this scenario:
A developer checks in a code that fix a bug or resolve a User Story. It does that by associating his check in with the work item ID.
His check in triggers a build that will associate the work item with his changeset. For bugs, the build will update the "Integrated in Build" field with the build number. We use this field to know in witch version the bug was fixed.
Is there any way to make Jenkins behave and do what TFS build service does?
Another option is to mix the two using dummy builds on the TFS side that set the records straight and kick-off the Jenkins' builds. Some hints
How to trigger Jenkins builds remotely and to pass parameters and “Fake” a TFS Build.
This approach requires a bit of effort but has many advantages:
No big-bang, use Jenkins opportunistically
Can continue using existing builds
Having a build identifier in TFS allows you an overall monitoring and to use the Test features
I have a VSTS build definition for one of our projects that requires jenkins to build, but we still have all our other products using VSTS natively. To maintain consistency, this build definition triggers a jenkins build. We configured the build definition to not sync code as jenkins will download it (save time) and not to publish the artifacts back to the agent (i have another script for that found here). This allows developers to continue to use git as normal, and the build/release process is consistent with our other products. Along with task tracking and such.
I have a TFS 2010 build service installed with three agents: Database, Production, and Release with mutually exclusive sets of builds running on each.
When builds are queued, unfortunately, they appear to get queued in groups of three regardless of which agent they're ready to go to. This means that we lose the parallelism I was hoping for if more than three builds from a single agent are run at once as they will take up the entire queue.
Is there a way to make sure that builds are queued once their own agent becomes free so that we can have as many parallel builds as possible?
Using the TFS 2010 default build defintion you cannot select an build agent but only a build controller unless you have customized it. Ideally you should have a single build controller, which has multiple build agents beneath it. Within the build definition you would only be selecting controller name and the build controller pushes the build to the agent which is free at that point. You can also use TAGS to make sure that the build runs on only a particular build agent.
Is it possible to set the build result for a build after that build is complete?
I could not find any plugins that do this already, and I was considering writing my own, but I wanted to see if this was even possible before going down that path.
(I have looked at existing code and how the "Fail The Build" plugin works as an example, but my understanding of the Jenkins code base is not advanced enough to understand what all the possibilities are.)
Use case: we have a build pipeline, and near the end of the pipeline there is a deploy-to-qa step that deploys the artifact to a QA environment. We have automated tests before this step to try to catch any problems with the artifact, but our test coverage is not very high in some areas so bugs could still slip through the cracks. I'd like to have the ability to mark a deploy-to-qa build as FAILED after the fact, to denote that that particular pipeline was invalid and is not a candidate for production release. (Basically the same as this Build Pipeline Plugin issue)
After some more investigation in the code, I believe that this is not possible.
From hudson.model.Run:
public void setResult(Result r) {
// state can change only when we are building
assert state==State.BUILDING;
// snip
...
}
So the build result cannot change except when in "building" state.
I could try to muck with the lastSuccessful and lastStable symlinks (as is done with the delete() function in hudson.model.AbstractBuild), but then those would be reset as soon as Jenkins reloaded the build results from jobs/JOBNAME/builds/.
I have an untested suggestion: Make a parametrized build, where the parameter determines if build will fail or not (for example simple bat / shell script testing the parameter from the environment variable it sets, and doing exit 0 or exit 1). This assumes that build pipelines manually triggered step will ask the parameters, and not use default values.
If it does not support interactive build parameters, then some other way is needed to tell this extra build step wether it should fail or not. Maybe editing upstream build description or display name to indicate failure, and then allowing build pipeline to continue to this extra build step, which probably has to use system groovy script to dig out upstream build description or display name.
I have seen several debates on this topic previously, and the outcome was always that it is theoretically possible to do so, but the codebase is not designed to allow this and it would have to be a very hacky workaround.
It's also been said that this is a bad practice in general, although I don't remember what the argument against it was.
I am facing the same requirement. I haven't found an appropriate plugin, changing the build status is not just a flag but has other impacts on links (eg latest successful build etc). So instead of changing the status of the build I looked for a possibility for qualifying the build. The Promoted Builds Plugin apply flags to build to define e.g. different quality stages. Build promotions can be performed manually or based on e.g. downstream project successful builds. Any successful build can be qualified, based on the promotion additional build and post build actions can be executed, e.g tagging or archiving.
Actually I was able to do it by changing the build.xml manually to <result>FAILURE</result>.
I've then played a little bit with mklink to create some symbolic links and also renamed the lastSuccessfulBuild to lastFailedBuild and it worked. If you are allowed to access the filesystem from within a Jenkins PlugIn, then it is possible to write one.
In case you are fine to delete the current build and start the same build using a version number and setting the next BUILD_NUMBER to the deleted one, then you could use this plugin to tell it to fail instead of succeed:
Fail The Build Plugin