Provides a cross-platform compatible msbuild task named "dependencies" that allows to download artifacts from a TeamCity server, as well as a GUI to edit the dependencies.
for providing error reporting.
TeamCity allows to define dependencies as part of a build job definition. However, that helps only on the TeamCity server itself, not when trying to build on a developer's machine or on a non-TeamCity build server.
Chris Hubbard's BuildUpdate tool improves the situation in that it can read the TeamCity job definition and create an update script that allows to download the artifacts from the TeamCity server.
While this tool improves things it still has some drawbacks:
- it still requires to define the dependencies in TeamCity first and as a second step to create the update script and commit that. This can lead to broken builds if the new dependencies won't work with the old code, but the new code can't be committed without having the new dependencies available.
- it downloads the files sequentially, i.e. the next download will start when the previous has finished.
- multiple platforms and architectures require separate scripts if the dependencies differ.
BuildDependency uses a slightly different approach. While it is possible (in the
BuildDependencyManager GUI) to select the artifacts that a TeamCity build produces, the
dependencies itself are defined locally in a git-config-style *.dep file. Each dependency can
specify the platform and architecture it applies to.
The downloads happen on multiple threads. A full download will occur only if the file on the server is newer than the existing local file. Additionally files are cached, so if multiple projects have overlapping dependencies the file will be copied from the cache which can save a download. Caching the files also allows to build when the Internet connection or the TeamCity server are not available.
The *.dep dependency file can be edited by the BuildDependencyManager GUI app, or directly
in a text editor.
Install the BuildDependencyTasks nuget
package, either in the solution (for use with a msbuild *.proj file), or directly in a project.
Download, unpack and run the latest BuildDependencyManager.zip file from
GitHub.