Configuring Artifact Dependencies

A build configuration can be made dependent on the artifacts of builds of some other build configurations. That means that before the build, all artifacts, the build configuration is dependent on will be downloaded and placed in their configured target locations and then can be used by the build.

There are two ways to define artifact dependencies:

• Via web UI
• Via Ant build.xml with using Ivy tasks or Ivy tool from the command line

Configuring Dependencies Using the Web UI

To add dependencies to a build configuration:

1. Open Edit build configuration page.
2. In the Build Configuration Steps, choose Artifact dependencies. 
3. Click Add new dependency link.
4. In the Artifacts Dependencies page, specify the following settings:
   • Build configuration and build from which artifacts should be taken
   • Paths to artifacts as they are shown on server
   • Destination path on agent where to put downloaded artifacts.

Configuring Dependencies in Ant build.xml

This solution is more complicated but allows greater flexibility. For example, configuring dependencies in this way will allow you to start a personal build and verify that your build is still compatible with dependencies.

To configure dependencies in Ant build.xml:

1. Download Ivy.

TeamCity itself acts as an Ivy repository. You can read more about the Ivy dependency manager here: http://ant.apache.org/ivy/.

2. Add Ivy to the classpath of your build.
3. Create ivyconf.xml file that contains some meta information about TeamCity repository. This file should have the following content:

4. Replace YOUR_TEAMCITY_HOST_NAME with the host name of your TeamCity server.

5. Place ivyconf.xml in the directory where your build.xml will be running.

6. In the same directory create ivy.xml file in which define which artifacts should be downloaded and where to put them, for example:

Where

• YOUR_ORGANIZATION should be replaced with the name of your organization.
• YOUR_MODULE should be replaced with the name of your project or module where artifacts will be used.
• BUILD_CONFIGURATION_ID should be replaced with id of the build configuration from where artifacts are downloaded. You can obtain this id from the links in your TeamCity server (you should take value of buildTypeId parameter). e.g. bt20
• BUILD_REVISION can be either build number or one of the following strings:
  • latest.lastFinished
  • latest.lastSuccessful
  • latest.lastPinned
• ARTIFACT_FILE_NAME_WITHOUT_EXTENSION file name or regular expression of the artifact without extension part.
• ARTIFACT_FILE_NAME_EXTENSION extension part of the artifact file name.

7. Modify your build.xml file and add tasks for downloading artifacts, for example (applicable for Ant 1.6 and later):

Please note that among ivy commons-httpclient, commons-logging and commons-codec should be in classpath of Ivy tasks.

Since 2.1 artifacts repository is protected by basic authentication. For accessing artifacts you should provide credentials to the <ivy:configure/> task. For example:

where TEAMCITY_HOST is hostname or IP address of your TeamCity server (without port and servlet context).
As USER_ID/PASSWORD you can use either username/password of a regular TeamCity user or system properties teamcity.auth.userId/teamcity.auth.password.

The properties teamcity.auth.userId/teamcity.auth.password store automatically generated build-unique values whose only intended use is artifacts downloading within the build script. The values are valid only during the time the build is running. Using the properties is preferable to using reall user credentials since it allows the server to track artifacts downloaded by your build. If the artifacts were downloaded by the build configuration artifact dependencies or using the supplied properties, the specific artifacts used by the build will be displayed on the build results page. In addition, the builds which were used to get the artifacts from will not be cleaned up by the clean-up process much like the pinned builds.

See also:

• Edit build configuration page
• Artifacts Dependencies page
• Build results Dependencies tab
• http://incubator.apache.org/ivy/doc/ant.html (Ivy Ant tasks).