Bamboo: Reuse artifacts of jobs

Question

We're currently evaluating Bamboo as a replacement for our Hudson CI server.

There is one thing dearly missing: The possibility to easily (!) reuse artifacts of build jobs. I know it's possible within a plan, but that's simply not enough.

I'd like to be able to have a preparation stage, containing jobs that assemble the artifacts of other jobs (of other plans) before the build stage of the plan is executed. Or to be able to plug in jobs from other plans into a stage as artifact-only jobs (no execution, just so that the artifacts are accessible).

Maybe we could create a Bamboo plugin for that, but currently we don't have the time to look into that.

In Hudson (back when we started) there was also no plugin for that, so we created our own plugin that - as a build step - copied artifacts from other jobs to the running job.

I read in Answers that cross-plan artifact sharing is on the roadmap for 2012, did I understand that correctly? But my impression is, it's not here yet, right?And there is no plugin in the Exchange that provides such a functionality (or did I miss it)?

Just want to make sure that I did not miss something and that the functionality is really missing right now.

Thanks.

Sascha

Jan Swaelens1 · Answer

We currently work around this by defining the artifacts on plan X and retrieve them using the ant <get> task in plan Y which needs them (using the HTTP URL which leads to the artifacts in combination with the 'latestSuccessfull' link of the plan).

I have been thinking about why this is not possible today using build in Bamboo features, in the end it makes sense that artifacts are contained within the boundaries of a single plan to make sure all sources matches up together - I think of it as a transaction.
But on the other hand, in very large projects it can take up a long time to build all required artifacts and then for instance start the tests.

Sascha Herrmann · Answer

Thanks. I tried to access the feature request, but I get a permission violation.

Sascha

James Dumay · Answer

Sascha, if this is what you are looking for, please watch and vote for this feature request that allows you to pass artifacts between plans.