Setting up a Bamboo Plan

[Chris G]

I am currently porting over my TeamCity setup to Bamboo and I've noticed I have to rely heavily on artifacts which seem to significantly increase the time it takes to build increase the disk space required. It's very possible I am misusing artifacts so I will give you an idea as to what my setup is.

My first stage is a checkout and build stage which has tasks to checkout my code, build my code, and run code analysis against the code. Pretty straightforward.

The next stage actually attempts to deploy the application to the dev server. It copies an app_offline.htm file to the server, deploys the application to the server, and then recopies the app_offline.htm file to the server (because there's more work to be done before the server should become available to testers again).

The problem is that for the second stage I need all of that compiled application from the first stage. This is easily done with an artifact but that's a lot of stuff (aspx pages, dlls, javascript files, etc.) that are being copied as artifacts so it can take a while to copy over.

I could just put all of these steps in one stage but then I'm not keeping an ideal separation of processes. I imagine I'm doing something wrong or just not understanding Bamboo's process correctly. Any ideas?

[Przemek Bruski · Accepted solution]

Stages should typically be used when you need to make sure that a set of Jobs (Jobs are run in parallel) has successfully completed building. There's nothing wrong in having just a single stage in your plan.

Don't think of a stage as something that organises your plans, it's not that - from your description you should have a single Job with multiple tasks.

Rule(s) of thumb:

- if you need to independently build stuff in parallel add Jobs.

- If you need to wait until a set of Jobs completes, add a Stage.