TeamCity 8 brings better organisation to continuous integration

Tool vendor JetBrains has released TeamCity 8, a new version of its continuous integration server. Projects can now be grouped in a hierarchy; this will make a significant difference when reusing project configurations as the child projects in a hierarchy can share user roles, VCS settings and other properties with the parent project. A variety of new reports can also help locate problems in the server configuration, and server waiting times can be reduced thanks to much faster build history cleanup methods.

Another addition is the Meta-runner, which allows users to reuse build steps in different configurations and run them as a native TeamCity runner. Users can now build feature branches using Mercurial bookmarks and Git tags, and TeamCity can display changes in Mercurial subrepositories.

Finally, the IntelliJ IDEA compiler is now integrated with TeamCity, which means that users can compile projects built with JetBrains' development environment faster and use languages and tools such as Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Kotlin, Android and GWT in the development process. Full details of all the changes are available in the release notes.

Alongside the update, JetBrains has announced new pricing. This means that from TeamCity 8 onwards, adding a build agent licence to the free professional server, which allows for three build agents and 20 build configurations, will now add 10 build configurations to the server. This move should mean that smaller teams can expand their TeamCity use without necessarily going to the full enterprise version with unlimited build configurations.

(djwm)