Branch Remote Run trigger automatically starts a new personal build each time TeamCity detects changes in particular branches of the VCS roots of the build configuration. At the moment this trigger supports only Git and Mercurial VCSes. A trigger monitors branches with names that match specific patterns. Default patterns are:
for Git repositories — refs/heads/remote-run/* for Mercurial repositories — remote-run/*
By default TeamCity triggers a personal build for the user detected in the last commit of the branch. You might also specify TeamCity user in the name of the branch. To do that use a placeholder TEAMCITY_USERNAME in the pattern and your TeamCity username in the name of the branch, for example pattern remote-run/TEAMCITY_USERNAME/* will match a branch remote-run/joe/my_feature and start a personal build for the TeamCity user joe (if such user exists).
note
At the moment there is no UI to show what's going on inside the trigger, so the only way to troubleshoot it is to look inside teamcity-remote-run.log. To see a more detailed log please enable debug-vcs logging preset at Administration | Server Configuration | Diagnostics.
In order to trigger a build branch should have at least one new commit comparing to the main branch.
Example: Run a personal build from a command line.
Git
% cd <your local git repo> % git branch * master % git checkout -b my_feature Switched to a new branch 'my_feature' //code, commit; code, commit % git push origin +HEAD:remote-run/my_feature
With the default pattern (refs/heads/remote-run/*) command git branch -r will list your personal branches. If you want to hide them, change the pattern to refs/remote-run/* and push your changes to branches like refs/remote-run/my_feature. In this case your branches are not listed by the above command, although you can see them anyway using git ls-remote <url of git repository>.
Mercurial
% cd <your local hg repo> % hg branch default % hg branch remote-run/my_feature marked working directory as branch remote-run/my_feature //code, commit; code, commit % hg push -b remote-run/my_feature --new-branch
Limitations
If your build configuration has 2 VCS roots which support branch remote-run and you push changes to both of them, TeamCity will start 2 personal builds with changes from each root.