TeamCity 8.0 Help

VCS Checkout Mode

The VCS Checkout mode is a configuration that sets how project sources reach an agent.

This mode affects only sources checkout. The current revision and changes data retrieving logic is executed by the TeamCity server and thus TeamCity server needs to access the VCS server in any mode.

Agents do not need any additional software for automatic checkout modes.

TeamCity has three different VCS checkout modes:

Checkout mode

Description

Automatically on server

This is the default setting. The TeamCity server will export the sources and pass them to an agent before each build. Since the sources are exported rather than checked out, no administrative data is stored in the file system and version control operations (like check-in, label or update) cannot be performed from the agent. TeamCity optimizes communications with the VCS servers by caching the sources and retrieving from the VCS server only the necessary changes (Clean Checkout on that). Unless Clean Checkout is performed, the server sends to the agent incremental patches to update only the files changed since the last build on the agent in the given checkout directory.

Automatically on agent

The build agent will check out the sources before the build. This checkout mode is supported only for CVS, Subversion, TFS, Mercurial, Perforce, ClearCase and Git. Agent-side checkout frees more server resources and provides the ability to access version control-specific directories (.svn, CVS, .git); that is, the build script can perform VCS operations (e.g. check-ins into the version control) — in this case ensure the build script uses credentials necessary for the check-in.

Do not check out files automatically

TeamCity will not check out any sources. The build script has to contain the commands to check out the sources. Please note that TeamCity will accurately report changes only if the checkout is performed on the revision specified by the Predefined Build Parameters properties passed into the build.

Last modified: 20 April 2023