Build Failure Conditions

In TeamCity you can adjust the conditions when a build should be marked as failed.

Common build failure conditions

On the Build Failure Conditions page, the Fail build if area, specify when TeamCity will fail builds:

• it runs longer than ... minutes: Check this option and enter a value in minutes to enable time control on the build. If the specified amount of time is exceeded, the build is automatically canceled. This option helps to deal with builds that hang and maintains agent efficiency.

• the build process exit code is not zero: Check this option to mark the build as failed if the build process doesn't exit successfully.

• at least one test failed: Check this option to mark the build as failed if the build fails at least one test. If this option is not checked, the build can be marked successful even if it fails to pass a number of tests. Regardless of this option, TeamCity will run all build steps.

• an error message is logged by build runner: Check this option to mark the build as failed if the build runner reports an error while building.

• an out of memory or crash is detected (Java only): Check this option to mark the build as failed if a crash of the JVM is detected, or Java out of memory problems. If possible, TeamCity will upload crash logs and memory dumps as artifacts for such builds.

Additional Failure Conditions

You can instruct TeamCity to mark a build as failed if some of its metrics has deteriorated in comparison with another build, e.g. code coverage, artifacts size, etc. For instance, you can mark build as failed if the code duplicates number is higher than in the previous build.

Another build failure condition causes TeamCity to mark build as failed when a certain text is present in the build log.

To add such a build failure condition to your build configuration, click Add build failure condition and select it from the list:

• fail-metric-change

• fail-log-message

Fail build on metric change

When using code examining tools in your build, like code coverage, duplicates finders, inspections and so on, your build generates various numeric metrics. For these metrics you can specify a threshold which, when exceeded, will fail a build.

In general there are two ways to configure this build fail condition:

• A build metric exceeds or is less than the specified threshold. For example: Fail build if build duration (secs) compared to constant value is more than* 300. In this case a build will fail if it runs more than 300 seconds.

• A build metric has changed comparing to a specific build by a specified value. For example: Fail build if its build duration (secs) compared to a value from another build is more by at least 300 default units for this metric than the value in the Last successful build. In this case a build will fail if it runs 300 seconds longer than the last successful build. If Working with Feature Branches is configured, then Working with Feature Branches is applied.

The following builds can be used as the basis for comparing build metics:

• last successful build

• last pinned build

• last finished build

• build with specified build number

• last finished build with specified tag.

By default, TeamCity provides the wide range of build metrics:

• artifacts size(bytes)

• build duration (secs)

• number of classes

• number of code duplicated

• number of covered classes

• number of covered lines

• number of covered methods

• number of failed tests

• number of ignored tests

• number of inspection errors

• number of inspection warnings

• number of lines of code

• number of methods

• number of passed tests

• number of tests

• percentage of block coverage

• percentage of class coverage

• percentage of line coverage

• percentage of method coverage

• percentage of statement coverage

• test duration (secs)

• total artifacts size (bytes)

Moreover, you can add your own build metric. To do so, you need to modify the TeamCity configuration file < >/config/main-config.xml and add the following section there:

<build-metrics> <statisticValue key="myMetric" description="build metric for number of files"/> </build-metrics>

So, if your build publishes the myMetric value, you can use it as a criterion for a build failure.

Fail build on specific text in build log

TeamCity can inspect all lines in build log for some particular text occurrence that indicates a build failure. Lines are matched without the time and block name prefixes which precede each message in the build log representation.

To configure this build failure condition, specify:

• a string or a Java Regular Expression whose presence/absence in the build log is an indicator of a build failure,

• a failure message to be displayed on the build results page when a build fails due to this condition.