CodeBetter – in collaboration with JetBrains, IdeaVine, and Devlicio.us – is proud to announce the launch of TeamCity.CodeBetter.com – a continuous integration server farm for open source projects. JetBrains is generously supporting our community efforts by funding the monthly costs of the server farm and providing a TeamCity Enterprise license. Volunteers from CodeBetter, IdeaVine, and Devlicio.us are administering the servers and setting up OSS projects on the build grid. We are currently providing CI for the following projects (in alphabetical order):

• Fluent NHibernate
• MassTransit
• NHibernate
• Ninject
• Rhino Tools (including Rhino Mocks, Rhino Commons, Rhino ServiceBus, …)
• Story Teller
• Structure Map

We will be adding additional OSS projects in the coming weeks/months. You can register for an account here or log in as a guest. By default, new users can view all hosted projects. If you are a project member, you can email us at teamcity@codebetter.com to have us add you as a project member. (N.B. You only need to be a project member on TeamCity if you need to manage/modify the build.)

The current build grid consists of:

• TeamCity – Dual CPU Quad-Core Xeon 5310 @ 1.60 GHz (clovertown) with 4GB RAM & 2x250GB SATA II in RAID-1
• Agents – Single CPU Dual-Core Xeon 5130 @ 2.00 GHz (Woodcrest) with 4GB RAM & 2x250GB SATA II

Both are physical servers hosted by SoftLayer. As we add more projects, we will add additional agent servers to distribute the load. Each agent will have the following software installed:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard x64 Edition SP2
• Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, 2.0 SP2, 3.0 SP2, 3.5 SP1
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SDK
• Windows SDK 6.1
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express (64-bit)
• Ruby 1.8.6-26 (including rake, rails, activerecord, and rubyzip)

Build scripts can be authored in NAnt, MSBuild, Rake, or any other build runner supported by TeamCity. The build farm monitors your current version control system – at SoureForge.net, Google Code, or elsewhere – for changes and supports Subversion, CVS, and other popular source control systems. (TeamCity 4.0.2 – current version – does not support GIT. GIT support is planned for the 4.1 release, which should to be released at the end of March. We will upgrade to TeamCity 4.1 as soon as it is released.)

Projects can use SQL Express for integration testing. N.B. We will not be manually setting up databases, virtual directories, or other services for projects. If you need a database created, your build script must include its creation/teardown.

If your build script includes unit/integration tests, TeamCity can display the results in the UI if they are in the correct format. We can work with individual projects to ensure that this is the case. TeamCity can archive build artifacts and make them available for download if projects want to make CI builds available to the community.

TeamCity has rich notification mechanisms for communicating build status of projects, including email, IDE (VS, IntelliJ, Eclipse), and Windows Tray notifiers. Alternately you can subscribe to the build server’s RSS feed for succeeded and failed builds, succeeded builds only, or failed builds only. You can make use of these tools to stay apprised of current build health as team members check in changes to source control. All notifiers can be downloaded and configured through the My Settings & Tools menu on the TeamCity server itself.

If you would like your OSS project considered for free CI hosting, you must meet the following requirements:

• Active project with a commit in the last 3 months.
• OSI-approved OSS license with a publicly available source.

We will prioritize requests for hosting solely at our discretion, though we will try to accommodate as many requests as possible. (We do have day jobs, you know.) We reserve the right to remove projects from the build farm that are monopolizing farm resources. (i.e. If a build script pegs all CPUs at 100% for one hour at a time, it’s going to get disabled so as to be fair to other projects.)

To apply to have us host CI for your OSS project:

• Register a user account here.
• Email teamcity@codebetter.com with the following information:
• Your user account name, which you created above.
• Project name & URL.
• Link to your OSI-approved OSS license.
• URL and type (SVN, CVS, …) of your source control system.
• Build runner (NAnt, MSBuild, Rake, etc.) and default target.
• Any additional requirements you might have.

CodeBetter, JetBrains, IdeaVine, and Devlicio.us are looking forward to providing free continuous integration hosting for the open source community. Please email us at teamcity@codebetter.com if you have any questions or comments.