TeamCity On-Premises 2021.1 Help

Perforce

This page contains descriptions of the fields and options available when setting up VCS roots using Perforce.
Common VCS root properties are described here.

P4 Connection Settings

Option

Description

Port

Specify the Perforce server address. The format is host:port. For specific environments, P4Host can be specified in the Workspace options below for any type of checkout.

Stream

Click this radio button to specify an existing Perforce stream. TeamCity will use this stream to prepare the stream-based workspace, and will use the client mapping from such a workspace.

TeamCity supports deeper directory structure within the root depot: depots with a depth of //DEPOTNAME/1/2/n can be specified in this field.

Parameters are supported. For the StreamAtChange option, use the Label to checkout field.

Enable feature branches support (experimental) — select this checkbox to specify branch streams you want to be monitored for changes in addition to the default one. Enter / Edit the branch specification as a newline-delimited set of rules. The syntax is +|-:stream_name (with the optional * placeholder).

Client

Click this radiobutton to directly specify the client workspace name. The workspace must be already created by a Perforce client application like P4V or P4Win. Only the mapping rules from the configured client workspace are used. The client name is ignored.

Client Mapping

Click this radiobutton to specify the mapping of the depot to the client computer. If you have Client mapping selected, TeamCity handles file separators according to the OS/platform of the build agent where a build is run. To enforce specific line separator for all build agents, use Client or Stream with the LineEnd option specified in Perforce instead of Client mapping. Alternatively, you can add an agent requirement to run builds only on a specific platform.

Example:

//depot/MPS/... //team-city-agent/... //depot/MPS/lib/tools/... //team-city-agent/tools/...

To focus on specific revisions, use the ChangeView specification:

//depot/... //team-city-agent/... ChangeView: //depot/dir1/…@90 //depot/dir2/…@automaticLabelWithRevision

where 90 is the number of the exact revision of dir1 and automaticLabelWithRevision is the labeled revision of dir2. All the other revisions of these directories will not be monitored by this VCS root.

Clean Checkout on a client mapping change is not enforced for the agent-side checkout in the following cases:

  • when a Perforce client name is used, changing the Perforce client mapping for the client will not result in a clean checkout

  • when a Perforce stream is used, changing the stream name while keeping the same stream root will not result in a clean checkout

If the direct client mapping is changed, a clean checkout will be forced unless the teamcity.perforce.enable-no-clean-checkout internal property is set on the server.

Username

Specify the user login name.

Password or Ticket

Specify the password or ticket.

If this field is specified, TeamCity

  • sets this value as P4PASSWD environment variable for executed perforce commands

  • uses this field as a password for p4 login command if password-based authentication is disabled on the perforce server

If the password is not specified at all, TeamCity relies on an existing p4 ticket for the current user (p4ticket.txt), and if the ticket is not present, it will fail.

The ticket file, should be present on all build agents where TeamCity runs perforce builds for this VCS root and on the TeamCity server (as the server also executes perforce commands).

Ticket-based authentication

Check this option to enable ticket-based authentication. This option is enabled by default and not displayed.

Case-Insensitivity in Checkout Rules

Note that Perforce support in TeamCity treats checkout rules as case-sensitive. Case-insensitivity for Perforce-based build configurations can be enabled on the Version Control Settings page by adding the following comment in the Edit Checkout Rules form: ##teamcity ignore-case.

Agent Checkout Settings

When the agent-side checkout is used, TeamCity creates a Perforce workspace for each checkout directory/ VCS root. These workspaces are automatically created when necessary and are automatically deleted after some idle time. It is possible to customize the name generated by TeamCity: add the teamcity.perforce.workspace.prefix configuration parameter at the Parameters page with the prefix in the value.

Option

Description

Workspace options

If needed, you can set here the following options for the p4 client command: Options, SubmitOptions, and LineEnd.
For specific environments, P4Host can be specified here for any type of checkout.

Create non-stream workspace

This option is available only when ' Stream' is selected in Connection Settings. Enable the option to be able to check out using a non-stream workspace based on the stream specification. This allows using checkout rules but makes it impossible to commit to the stream within the build.

Run 'p4 clean' for clean-up

Enable this option to clean up your workspace from extra files before a build (since p4 2014.1). When enabled, the p4 clean command will be run before p4 sync command, unless p4 sync -f or p4 sync -p is used. See the command reference.

Skip the have list update

Enable this option not to track files on the Perforce server on sync (always transfer all files to the agent, p4 sync -p).

Extra sync options

Specify additional p4 sync options, like --parallel. See command reference.

Perforce Workspace Parameters

With checkout on an agent, TeamCity provides environment variables describing the Perforce workspace created during the checkout process.
If several Perforce VCS roots are used for the checkout, the variables are created for the first VCS root. The variables are:

  • P4USER — same as vcsroot.<VCS root ID>.user parameter

  • P4PORT — same as vcsroot.<VCS root ID>.port parameter

  • P4CLIENT — name of the generated P4 workspace on the agent These variables can be used to perform custom p4 commands after the checkout.

More information: Perforce Workspace Handling in TeamCity

Perforce Proxy Settings

To allow using Perforce proxy with the agent-side checkout, specify the env.TEAMCITY_P4PORT environment variable on the build agent and the agent will take this value as the P4PORT value.

Other Settings

P4 path on the build agent

Specify the path to the Perforce command-line client: p4.exe file.

This field works only on the agent side for agent-side checkout. On the agent side, the value of this parameter could be overridden via TEAMCITY_P4_PATH environment variable, if such a variable is set in buildAgent.properties or comes from build parameters.

For the server, the p4 binary should be present in the PATH of the TeamCity server or can be specified via the teamcity.perforce.customP4Path internal property.

To restore old behavior, the teamcity.perforce.p4PathOnServerWhitelist internal property can be used to specify a semicolon-separated list of allowed p4 paths.

Label/changelist to sync

If you need to check out sources not with the latest revision, but with a specific Perforce label (with selective changes), you can specify this label here. For instance, this can be useful to produce a milestone/release build. If the field is left blank, the latest changelist will be used for sync.

Charset

Select the character set used on the client computer.

Support UTF-16 encoding

Enable this option if you have UTF-16 files stored as utf16 Perforce file type in your project.

You may want to enable this option if you use server-side checkout and have files of the utf16 Perforce file type in your depot. Enable this flag for the checked out files to be in the UTF-16 encoding. Otherwise, such files may be converted to UTF-8 upon checkout.

If you store UTF-16 files as the binary Perforce file type, they will always be checked out "as is", no conversion will be performed.

Perforce Jobs Support

For a changelist which was checked in with one or several associated jobs, TeamCity shows a wrench icon wrench.png which allows you to view details of the jobs when clicked or hovered over.

Logging

All Perforce plugin operations are logged into teamcity-vcs.log files with category jetbrains.buildServer.VCS.P4 (on an agent or on a server, depending on the operation context). The detailed logging can be enabled with TeamCity Server Logs.

Perforce Workspace Handling in TeamCity

Refer to a separate page.

Perforce Helix Core Compatibility

Refer to a separate page.

Perforce Streams as feature branches

Refer to a separate page.

Last modified: 16 September 2021