Project groups

Several important improvements and bug fixes have been made in project groups feature.

• projects hierarchy is shown on Administration -> Projects page the same way as it shown in the Projects popup
• Configure Visible Projects dialog has become aware of project hierarchy
• projects hierarchy is shown on Administration -> Disk usage page
• projects hierarchy is shown in all drop downs where a list of projects or configurations is displayed
• investigations page for a project also shows all investigations from sub-projects. The same applies to muted problems page, current problems, build chains and project change log. All these pages will show sub-projects too.
• notification rule defined for a project will be effective for sub-projects too
• builds schedule page for a project shows schedule from sub-projects too
• it is now possible to define cleanup rules for projects, such cleanup rules serve as default for configurations from this project and sub project. Default cleanup rule is replaced with cleanup rule in Root project.

External IDs for build configuration and template

It is now possible to define external ID for build configuration or template. It works the same way as external ID for project, i.e. it is used in URLs instead of internal ID, and it is used in configuration files. However with build configuration external IDs add some additional benefits:

• if you're using dependency parameters, you can use external IDs there instead of cryptic btXXX: dep.<my build configuration external id>.build.number
• you can access build artifacts using a URL like this: http://<host>/repository/download/<my build configuration external id>/lastSuccessful/artifact.zip
• external ID can be used when build is triggered by HTTP request and in REST requests

Read more about using external IDs when accessing server by HTTP in our documentation: Accessing Server by HTTP, Patterns For Accessing Build Artifacts

Project configuration files changes

We continue refactoring the way configuration files are stored on disk under TeamCity data directory. This EAP brings two important changes:

• from now on, build configuration internal ID is no longer stored in project configuration files, external ID is used instead, the same applies to build configuration template.
• since all VCS roots now belong to projects we removed the global vcs-roots.xml file and moved VCS roots settings to corresponding projects.

Meta runner

Meta-runner is a Build Runner which acts as a combination of one or more build runners and has user interface targeted to user domain. For example, it is possible to configure build step based on Ant to upload some file to ftp. You can move this build step in some template, replace host, user and password with parameter references (%host%, %user%), and then reuse this template in several build configurations. This approach gives some flexibility, but is not very user friendly. Isn't it better to have a dedicated build runner for this task with specific user interface? This is what Meta-runner about.

Queued build page

Dependencies progress has been added on queued build page, you can now see estimates for all dependencies in one place.

Build problems

Disk usage report

Disk usage report has become aware of projects hierarchy. You can see how much disk space is taken by the project as a whole, and also drill down to sub-projects and see what sub-project uses most of disk space.
Additionally, one more server health report is now provided based on disk usage. This report shows configurations with huge log files, as well as links to builds having these log files. Huge (hundreds of megabytes) build logs are rarely useful, it is hard to analyze them and in most of cases they just waste space on disk. We hope this report will help to find configurations that produce such log files and fix them.

Branch filters in triggers

VCS and Schedule trigger have got new setting: Branch filter. With the help of the new filter you can limit the set of branches where automatic triggering will be performed. Read more about branch filters in our documentation: Working with Feature Branches#Triggers

Mercurial subrepo improvements

• better UI for subrepo graphs

Other

• Server ID - we need some way to remove duplicate usage statistics reports from our database. To be able to do it we introduced a unique identifier - server ID, which is sent together with usage statistics report. This ID is completely anonymous and does not contain machine-specific information.
• Schedule trigger now supports defining time to trigger in a specific timezone.