Gingter Ale

Fluent stories of a software engineer

A small infrastructure upgrade

2013-06-21

In my “Setting up my infrastructure” posts I explained why I chose JetBrains TeamCity and YouTrack over the Atlassian tools Jira and Bamboo. It was not because of the feature set but because the setup was way more hazzle free and it seems maintaining them would be easy.

Well - I was right ;-)

Just yesterday JetBrains released a new major update of TeamCity: Version 8.0.

My feature request ticket indicated that it was included in the 8.0 release, and so I updated to check that out.

I downloaded the 400+ MB installer, which took a while, even to my VServer with a good bandwidth reading. I then installed the new version, which took care of everything else. Installation took a minute or so (with uninstalling the previous version). Starting up TeamCity 8 required a database update, so it asked me for the authentication token it wrote in its log files for startup. Digging that out took a minute too. Database upgrade took like another minute - while I must admit that there is no real load on my TeamCity installation, there’s almost no data in it. All my Agents automatically updated themselves within another two or three minutes.

After all, it was not much more than perhaps 10 to 15 minutes for the update, most of the time just waiting for something to complete. To be honest I am very pleased with the experience and the required effort. JetBrains made administrating this build server really painless and smooth. Kudos.

And after I checked: Yes, TeamCity 8.0 now can work with MSTest from the Visual Studio Agent installation and does not require either a full VisualStudio installation or a custom path to the MSbuild.exe anymore.