Development Environment

Plugin Reloading

If you make changes to a plugin, you will generally need to shut down the server, update the plugin, and start the server again.

To enable TeamCity development mode, pass the "teamcity.development.mode=true" Configuring TeamCity Server Startup Properties. Using the option you will:

• Enforce application server to quicker recompile changed .jsp classes

• Disable JS and CSS resources merging/caching

The following hints can help you eliminate the restart in the certain cases:

• if you do not change code affecting plugin initialization and change only body of the methods, you can attach to the server process with a debugger and use Java hotswap to reload the changed classes from your IDE without web server restart. Note that the standard hotswap does not allow you to change method signatures.

• if you make a change in some resource (jsp, js, images) you can copy the resources to webapps/ROOT/plugins/<plugin-name> directory to allow Tomcat to reload them.

• change in build agent part of plugin will initiate build agents upgrade.

If you replace a deployed plugin .zip file with changed class files while TeamCity server is running, this can lead to NoClassDefFound errors. To avoid this, set "teamcity.development.shadowCopyClasses=true" Configuring TeamCity Server Startup Properties. This will result in:

• creating ".teamcity_shadow" directory for each plugin .jar file;

• avoid .jar files update on plugin archive change.