The use of plugins allows you to extend the TeamCity functionality. See the list of existing TeamCity plugins created by JetBrains developers and community.
This document provides information on how to develop and publish a server-side plugin for TeamCity using Maven. The plugin will display the Hello World jsp page when using a specific URL to the TeamCity Web UI.
On this page:
A plugin in TeamCity is a zip archive containing a number of classes packed into a JAR file.
Step 1. Set up the environment
To get started writing a plugin for TeamCity, set up the plugin development environment.
- Download and install TeamCity on your development machine. Since you are going to use this machine to test your plugin, it is recommended that this TeamCity server is of the same version as your production server. We are using TeamCity 9.0.2 installed on Windows 8 Pro in our setup.
- Download and install a Java IDE; we are using Intellij IDEA 14.0.3 Community Edition, which has a built-in Maven integration.
- Download and install Oracle Java. Set Java_Home on your system. We are using Java 1.7.0_25.
- Download and install Apache Maven. Set M2_HOME. Run
mvn -version
to verify your setup. We are using Maven 3.2.5. in our setup.
Step 2. Generate a Maven project
We'll generate a Maven project from an archetype residing in JetBrains Maven repository; executing the following command will produce a project for a server-side-only plugin depending on 9.0 TeamCity version:
You will be asked to enter the Maven groudId
, artifactId
, version
and packaging
for your plugin. The artifactId
will be used as the internal name of your plugin.
We are using the following settings:
groudId
- teamcity.plugin.demo
artifactId
- demo-plugin
version
- 1.0
packaging
- pom
When the build finishes, you'll see that the demo-plugin
directory (the same name as the artifactId
) was created in the home directory of the current user.
View the project structure
The root of the demo-plugin
directory contains the following:
- the
readme.txt
file with minimal instructions to develop a server-side plugin - the
pom.xml
file which is your Project Object Model - the
teamcity-plugin.xml
file which is your plugin descriptor containing meta information about the plugin. - the
demo-plugin-server
directory contains the plugin sources:\src\main\java\pom
contains the App.Java filesrc\main\resources
includes resources controlling the plugin look and feel.src\main\resources\META-INF
folder containsbuild-server-plugin-demo-plugin.xml
, the bean definition file for our plugin. TeamCity plugins are initialized in their own Spring containers and every plugin needs a Spring bean definition file describing the main services of the plugin.
- the
build
directory contains the xml files which define how the project output is aggregated into a single distributable archive.
Step 3. Add information to your plugin description
Edit the teamcity-plugin.xml
file in the project root folder and add the plugin display name and description by modifying the corresponding
attributes in the file. You can also specify additional information, such as the plugin author, email and etc.
Step 4. Create the project sources
Open the pom.xml
from the project root folder with Intellij IDEA.
We are going to make a controller class which will return Hello.jsp
via a specific TeamCity URL.
A. Create the plugin web-resources
The plugin web resources (files that are accessed via hyperlinks and JSP pages) are to be placed into the buildServerResources
subfolder of the plugin's resources:
- First we'll create the directory for our jsp: go to the
src\main\resources
directory in IDEA, right-click the folder, select New -> Directory and create thebuildServerResources
directory. - Next go to the
src\main\resources\buildServerResources
, right-click the folder, select New -> File and create thehello.jsp
file.
B. Create the controller
Go to \src\main\java\pom
and open AppServer.Java to create a custom controller:
- We'll create a simple controller which extends the TeamCity
jetbrains.buildServer.controllers.BaseController
class and implementsBaseController.doHandle(HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse)
method. - The TeamCity open API provides the
jetbrains.buildServer.web.openapi.WebControllerManager which allows registering custom controllers using the path to them: the path is a part of URL starting with a slash
/
appended to the URL of the server root.
At the moment our AppServer.Java file looks as follows:
C. Construct the path to your JSP file
When a plugin is unpacked on the TeamCity server, the paths to its resources change. To obtain valid paths to your JSP after the plugin is installed, use the
jetbrains.buildServer.web.openapi.PluginDescriptor class which implements the getPluginResourcesPath
method; otherwise TeamCity might have difficulties finding your resources.
D. Update the Spring bean definition
Go to the src\main\resources\META-INF
directory and update build-server-plugin-demo-plugin.xml
to include our AppServer class.
Build your project with Maven
Go to the root directory of your project and run
The target
directory of the project root will contain the <artifactId>.zip
file. It is our plugin package, ready to be installed.
Step 4. Install the plugin to TeamCity
Copy the plugin zip to <TeamCity Data Directory>/plugins directory.
Restart the server and locate the TeamCity Demo Plugin in the Administration|Plugins List to verify the plugin was installed correctly.
The hello World page is available via <TeamCity server URL>/demo-plugin.html