01_03 TeamCity

TeamCity Professional is a self-hosted, build management and continuous integration server from JetBrains, the company behind popular software development tools and the Kotlin programming language.

Recommended Resources

• TeamCity On-Premises Documentation Home
• Learn TeamCity

Prerequisites

Having the following items in place before starting this lab will help you have a smooth experience.

1. A GitHub account is required to host the code for the sample application.
2. An Amazon Web Services account is needed to deploy and host the Jenkins server and the sample application used for the deployment target.
3. The sample application should be in place before starting. See 00_06 About the Exercise Files for steps to deploy the sample application.

Deploy the TeamCity server

1. Create an AWS CloudFormation Stack using the provided template

1. Log into your AWS account. Select the search bar at the top of the page and enter CloudFormation.
2. On the CloudFormation homepage, select Create stack. If the button includes a dropdown, select With new resources (standard).
3. Under "Prerequisite - Prepare template", confirm that "Template is ready" is selected.
4. Under "Specify template", select Upload a template file. Select Chose file. Browse to the exercise files for this lesson on your local system. Select teamcity-cloudformation-template.yml. Select Open. Select Next.
5. Enter a name for the stack under "Stack name"; teamcity is a good choice. Note that the name should only include letters (A-Z and a-z), numbers (0-9), and dashes (-).
6. Accept the defaults under "Parameters" and select Next.
7. On the "Configure stack options" screen, keep all options as the default. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Next.
8. On the "Review" screen, scroll to the bottom of the page and select the checkbox next to "I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names". Select Submit.
9. Review the "Events" tab on the stack homepage until CREATE_COMPLETE is reported under the "Status" column for the Logical ID that matches your stack name. Note that it may take 5 to 10 minutes for the stack to report CREATE_COMPLETE.
10. On the stack homepage, select the "Outputs" column. Open the value for the key "URL" in a new tab.

2. Configure the TeamCity server

1. On the TeamCity homepage, select Proceed.
2. On the "Database connection setup" page, next to "Select the database type", select Internal (HSQLDB). Note that this option selects an embedded database which is for evaluation purposes and is not intended for production use. Select Proceed.
3. On the "License Agreement" page, scroll to the bottom of the page, select the checkbox next to Accept license agreement. Select Continue.
4. On the "Create Administrator Account" page, select a username and password for your admin account and select Create Account.
5. At the top left of the TeamCity home page, select Agents.
6. In the menu on the left under "Overview", select Unauthorized to expose the two agents that were deployed with the server.
7. Select agent-1. On the configuration page for agent-1, select Authorize. Enter a comment for the authorization (perhaps, "Add new agent") and select Authorize.
8. Repeat the authorization steps for "agent-2".

Implement the Experimental Pipeline

To implement the experimental pipeline in TeamCity, you will need to create a GitHub repo and add the exercise files.

You'll start by creating the project that implements the pipeline. After that, you'll update the project parameters.

And finally, you'll trigger the pipeline to deploy the sample application.

Before starting these steps, open the Output tab of the Cloudformation stack for the sample application. You'll be referencing values displayed on that tab.

1. Create a GitHub repo for the sample application code

Because this course covers multiple tools, a dedicated repo is need for each tool to prevent unexpected deployments to the sample-application.

1.1 Create the repo

1. Create a new GitHub repo. Give the repo a name and description. Please select Public for the repo visibility to simplify access. Select the option to add a README file and select Python when adding a .gitignore file.
2. From the repo home page, select Add file -> Upload files.
3. Select choose your files and browse to the exercise files for this lesson on your local system.
4. Select all of the files and then select Open.
5. After the files have been uploaded, enter a commit message and select Commit changes.
6. Follow the instructions for relocating the pom.xml and settings.kts files.

1.2 Relocate the pom.xml and settings.kts files into .teamcity

NOTE: THIS IS A KEY STEP TO GET THE TEAMCITY CONFIGURATION WORKING.

Before importing the repo into a TeamCity project, the configuration files -- pom.xml and settings.kts -- need to be located inside the repo in a hidden directory named .teamcity.

Follow these steps to create the directory and get the files in place.

1. From the root of your repo, select the file pom.xml.

2. Begin editing the file by selecting the pencil icon on the top right of the file listing or by typing e on your keyboard.

3. In the filename field, type .teamcity/. This will create the .teamcity directory and place pom.xml inside the directory. See the images below for clarification.

   Before adding the .teamcity directory for pom.xml:

   After adding the .teamcity directory for pom.xml:

4. Select Commit changes.... On the dialog that appears, select Commit changes.

5. Browse back to the root of the repo and repeat the process for settings.kts.

   Before adding the .teamcity directory for settings.kts:

   After adding the .teamcity directory for settings.kts:

2. Setup the pipeline

1. From the home page of your TeamCity server, select Create project....

2. Confirm "From a repository URL" is selected. Next to "Repository URL:" enter the URL for your GitHub Repo. Find this value from the home page of your repo by selecting Code -> HTTPS and then selecting the stacked squares icon to copy the URL to your system's clipboard. Paste that value in as the repo URL. Select Proceed.

3. On the "Create Project From URL" page, select Import settings from .teamcity/settings.kts and enable synchronization with the VCS repository".

4. For "Project name:" enter Experimental Pipeline. Select Proceed.

5. On the "Experimental Pipeline" configuration page, under "Build Configurations", select Build.

6. From the menu on the left-hand side of the page, select Parameters.

7. For each of the values under "Environment Variables (env.)", select Edit and update the parameter with the corresponding value for your project. Note: Take care when copying values from the "Outputs" tab of the Cloudformation console as the values may contain tabs at the very end of the text.

   After all 7 parameters are in place, your configuration should appear as follows:

   

3. Run the pipeline

1. At the top right of the page, select Run.
2. Select Go to build configuration page to see the build in progress.
3. Allow the build to complete.
4. If any errors are encountered, review the logs for errors and make corrections as needed. Consider reviewing the configuration steps for the tasks and the values for the variables. If you are not able to resolve the errors, please post a question on LinkedIn Learning in the course Q&A section.
5. Open the URLs for the sample application's staging and production environments. For both environments, confirm that the deployment platform is "TeamCity" and the build number matches the last successful build number.

(OPTIONAL) Connect to a TeamCity Agent

TeamCity allows you to connect to the agents where your jobs will run. This allows for debugging and exploration in the same environment used for building your projects.

1. At the top of the TeamCity home page, select Agents.

2. Select agent-1 and then select Open Terminal. This opens a new tab with a shell connected to the agent.

3. In the shell, run the following commands:

    bash
    whoami
    cd /opt/buildagent/work/
    ls
   

   This starts a bash shell which will provide more functionality than the default shell based on sh. The session connects as the buildagent user.

   The /opt/buildagent/work/ directory contains the sub-directories where your project steps are run.

   You can find the specific directory that corresponds to a build by checking the logs for "Checkout directory: /opt/buildagent/work/12345678abcdefg"

4. Change directories to one of the work sub-directories and activate the Python virtual environment. Then, run the project script.

    cd /opt/buildagent/work/<your_directory_name here>
    python3 index_test.py
    python3 index.py
   

5. End the session by closing the tab.

Next: 01_04 Self Hosted Tool Summary