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Hosted TeamCity for Open Source – A New Home

Back in 2008, with the release of TeamCity 3.1, James Kovacs, Brendan Tompkins and a few others contacted us in order to provide a hosted TeamCity instance for OSS projects in .NET. That ultimately became the TeamCity at CodeBetter site.

For quite a few number of years, the service was maintained and hosted by volunteers from CodeBetter and the last years by Anne Epstein, who has been doing a wonderful job of single-handedly managing new projects, etc.

JetBrains’ involvement in the project was merely limited to providing TeamCity licenses and monetary support for the server, until around 2014. Since then we’ve been slightly more involved in terms of TeamCity administration. However server maintenance and other aspects were out of our area of responsibility.

While doing this, we were also in parallel conversations of providing a more reliable and faster service (and servers) to OSS projects and somehow consolidating .NET projects with what we’ve been offering for projects on TeamCity at JetBrains

Unfortunately this past September, the hardware died  and did so badly. Luckily we managed to rescue most of the projects and data and continue with the migration process to our own servers. For a complete list of what was ported and what was not please see What was Saved below.

Hosting the OSS projects

If your project was one of those migrated from CodeBetter, then you should already have it available on the new server. If any issues arise, please ping us at teamcity-support@jetbrains.com.

We are conservatively adding new projects, but at a slower rate than with CodeBetter in that we want to make sure we can cater to a correct level of service that is required. If you’re looking at hosting a new project, please reach out to us at teamcity-support@jetbrains.com.

What was saved

  • Projects and their settings. Project and build configuration IDs used in URLs are also left as they were except for conflicting cases where the “cb_” prefix was added to the IDs.
  • Users with non-view roles. The majority of user accounts with special permissions from teamcity.codebetter.com continue to work with the same credentials. Some of the users who had the same usernames on teamcity.jetbrains.com server, need to use their teamcity.jetbrains.com credentials to login. Users with no special permissions: please create new account if you do not already have one.
  • History of builds and changes
  • 15% of the build logs and artifacts
  • The same “JetBrains” agents are connected to the server

Some changes

  • The server address. http://teamcity.codebetter.com/ shows a move notice page, sub-URLs are redirected to teamcity.jetbrains.com server
  • Internal build- and change-level URLs (numeric IDs are remapped to new values)
  • Majority of the build logs and build artifacts are not present. It should be possible to rerun an important history build to get the same revision artifacts.
  • Old “CodeBetter” agents are no longer connected to the server
  • Several plugins are no longer available: GitHub issues, TeamCity.Node, Bazaar, CMake, GitHub status (use “Commit status publisher” instead)
  • New “from” in Email and Jabber notifications sent out by the server

Acknowledgements

We really appreciate all the effort that Anne Epstein put into maintaining the CodeBetter. We also want to thank James, Brendan, and all those involved throughout these years in bringing TeamCity to the .NET Open Source world.

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