Using TeamCity, how to manually trigger a DEPLOY against a previously built and tested build run

In more recent versions of TeamCity...

In the build definition you can identify artifacts which can be copied/zipped. Artifacts can then be downloaded manually or referenced from another build (Artifact Dependency).

You can setup a 'build configuration' to do your deployment directly from artifacts produced by your ci build.

• Create a build to do your deployment
• Build Step
  • Run: Executable with parameters
  • Command executable: .bat file (make sure it as part of the ci build artifacts generated)
  • Command parameters: whatever parameters your patch files needs
• Dependencies
  • Add New Artifact dependency
  • Depend on: select the ci build you want to deploy
  • GetArtifacts from: Last successful build
  • Artifact rules: +:**/*.*

So, given artifacts (like your batch file) are in the CI build... You now have a 'deploy' build. When you run it (manually or setup a Build Trigger) it will copy all the CI build artifacts to it's working directory (Artifact Dependency) and then run your batch file to do the deployment.

Pretty slick.

note: just make sure that the account running the TeamCity BuildAgent has permissions to do all the deployment stuff.

Hope this helps somebody as it took me a while to sort this out ;)

We do something similar for one of my projects. We use 2 build configurations.

The first one builds the solution, runs unit tests and produces the artifacts.

The second build is set up with an Artifact Dependency on the last successful build. That means the second build will start out grabbing the artifacts from the first build. The second build would have a build step that uploads to the ftp site. The second build is setup with a Finish Build Trigger pointing to the first build. That will make it kick off whenever the first build finishes.

It's a bit more work this way, but once you have it setup it works pretty well.