Team City – Update Packages

Here at Dovetail we love Team City and Visual Studio.

We recently updated our Team City configuration to allow projects to be built using Visual Studio 2015, C# 6, and to use the latest Nuget package manager.

In doing so, we discovered a very peculiar setting deep within Team City that caused one of our projects to break on build and break once deployed.

The Build Failures

After updating, we ran our build and the compiler threw an error saying that it could not find a specific version of a Nuget package. For example, our packages.config within Visual Studio specified we use Nuget to install Newtonsoft.Json version 7. However Team City reported that the project needed Newtonsoft.Json version 8.

We made the decision to update all affected nuget packages to the latest versions, pushed our project and Team City built it successfully.

The Deploy Failure

We then ran into our next problem. The project was deployed but there was nothing on the screen. We opened up Chrome developer tools and found that JQuery was missing. This is a project that uses a lot of JavaScript files and it built and deployed with no problems before.

Looking back at our Octopus Deploy package we found that the JQuery file we were referencing and pushing to our repository was not there any more. However, we did see the latest version of the JQuery min file. Our file was being removed and replaced with the latest JQuery min version.

The Update Package Setting

We soon found the setting buried deep inside the Team City “build steps” screens:

Within the NuGet Installer build step is a setting which, when turned on, updates all your packages. This sounds great in theory but when you run into build and deploy issues this will cause headaches.

The text underneath states “Uses the NuGet update command to update all packages under solution. Package versions and constraints are taken from packages.config files”. Whether this is a bug in Team City or not, this text seems very vague for an “Update Packages” function.

Be careful, because when checking this check-box, Team City will not read the packages.config version numbers and instead it will download the latest version of every package.

Update: Team City have been back to us and they’re going to update the explanatory text on this checkbox to make it more clear.