Pipelines 101: Common Concepts

Common Terms

In Pipelines, any CI/CD routine consists of three logical blocks:

• Step — a simple build action an agent performs, such as testing a Maven solution, executing a shell script, or building a Gradle project. Steps are not standalone entities and always have parent Jobs.

• Job — a sequence of consecutively executed Steps. These are "build configurations" in classic TeamCity terminology.

• Pipeline — a sequence of Jobs executed either consecutively or in parallel. Jobs united in a Pipeline can share output files. Multi-Job Pipelines are counterparts to classic TeamCity "build chains".

Supported VCS and Project Types

Supported version control systems:

• GitHub

• GitLab

• Bitbucket Cloud

TeamCity Pipelines supports any project that can be built locally using Shell commands. In addition, Pipelines feature a few specialized runners tailored to interact with the specific building tools:

• Gradle

• Maven

• NodeJS

• Unity (available upon request)

These specialized runners provide quick access to advanced build tool settings: optional command-line arguments, tool version, JVM arguments, and so on.

Initial Setup

When you open TeamCity Pipelines for the first time, TeamCity asks you log in via a GitHub.com, GitLab.com, or Bitbucket Cloud account.

Log in using a regular username/password credentials pair and TeamCity will configure and install an OAuth app to your account. Follow instructions on your screen to grant TeamCity access to your account.

The installed OAuth app grants TeamCity the following permissions:

• Read org and team membership

• Read org projects

• Full control of private repositories

• Access user email addresses (read-only)

• Write repository hooks

TeamCity uses OAuth apps to scan for repositories owned by and shared with you. You will be able to create new projects by clicking any repository from the list.

You can revoke TeamCity’s access to VCS at any time. To do this, open your VCS account settings and revoke access permissions for the TeamCity Cloud Dev app. For example, on GitHub navigate to the Applications | Authorized OAuth Apps page.

YAML Configuration

TeamCity can display all Pipeline, Job, and Step settings as a YAML markup. When editing a Pipeline, use the Visual/YAML toggle switch between editing modes.

A YAML configuration file allows you to quickly view, validate, edit, and share settings of your building routine. The syntax editor highlights keywords and shows compilation errors.

See this article for more information: Working with YAML.

Optimization

TeamCity Pipelines employ a number of smart features that allow builds to avoid wasting precious time and resources on performing repeated actions. For example, if your Jobs are organized in a single "Job A → Job B" chain and "Job A" detects no new pending changes, "Job B" can reuse the last successful "Job A" build instead of triggering it anew.

See this article for more information: Pipeline Optimization.