Windows Development on Bitbucket Pipelines and Artifacts
Asked by Brandon_Patton:

We are currently utilizing Bitbucket Data Center and Bamboo Data Center - looking to move everything to Bitbucket Cloud and utilize Pipelines for our builds.

However, we are a Windows shop, creating Windows applications. The current methodology is that developers generated a branch via Jira, write the code, and then push into Bitbucket, which then kicks off a build in Bamboo. We have remote agents running on VMs that are equiped with Visual Studio and all necessary dependencies.

At the end of the build, the artifact is then pushed back up to Bamboo for access to our teams.

Looking at Bitbucket Cloud - it looks like the terminology has switched from Agents to 'Runners'. And it looks like we can continue using on-prem runners to dispatch and kick off builds of our code.

However, it was relayed to me that there isn't a mechanism for artifacts created in this fashion to be sent back up to Bitbucket Cloud - which is a critical step in our processes. I'm also seeing that unlike Bamboo, there is no way to view build information as it's going on - no build status, agent status, or logging to see the progress of a build underway from within Bitbucket Pipelines.

Is this really the case? Or was I misinformed? If it's the case, this either forces us to remain with Bamboo Data Center for the foreseable future, or to start investigating a non-Atlassian solution to this.

Any thoughts or insight are greatly appreciated - as I'm sure we aren't the only Windows dev utilizing these solutions.

Thanks!


Answers:
author: Theodora Boudale
body: Hi Brandon,

Thank you for reaching out.

You can upload any files you generate during a Pipelines build to the Downloads section of the repository. You can find more details here:

* <https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/deploy-build-artifacts-to-bitbucket-downloads/>

Please keep in mind that we have a limit of 1 GB for uploading files to the Downloads section.
> I'm also seeing that unlike Bamboo, there is no way to view build information as it's going on - no build status, agent status, or logging to see the progress of a build underway from within Bitbucket Pipelines.

As soon as a new Pipelines build is triggered, you can see it on the Pipelines page of the repository on Bitbucket's website. You can then select it to view the build logs. If the build is still running, you can see in the build log the completed commands and their output, as well as the command that is currently running and the output it generates.

You can see some screenshots here:

* <https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/view-your-pipeline/>

Windows runners can be configured either at the repository or at the workspace level. If you check the Repository or Workspace runners on Bitbucket Cloud website you can see which runners are online, offline, unregistered, or disabled.

Another thing to take into account is that Windows Runners use PowerShell to run pipeline steps on a Windows machine (host device), so the commands used in a Pipelines build with a Windows runner need to run on Powershell. You can find more info on Windows runners here:

* <https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/set-up-runners-for-windows/>

Please feel free to reach out if you have any other questions!

Kind regards,  
Theodora


Tags: bitbucket-cloud

cloud