How do I start an evaluation?

To get started with Bamboo, you can begin by downloading and installing Bamboo. When the Setup Wizard asks for a license key, follow the link to the Atlassian Website. You can then request an evaluation license key, which requires the Server ID provided in the Setup Wizard. 

Can I have more than 100 remote agents?

We don't offer a license greater than 100 remote agents at this stage, and we haven't had many requests to justify the introduction of a higher tier. However, we will certainly consider it for the future. If you do require more than 100 remote agents, feel free to contact our support team, as we would love to learn more about your requirements and whether adding a separate instance of Bamboo would meet your needs. A separate instance has advantages in terms of scaling, performance, and availability (if one server goes down, the other will stay unaffected). Of course, it comes with some overhead in terms of administration. 

What is the difference between local and remote agents?

A Bamboo agent is a service that provides capabilities to run Job builds. A local agent runs on the Bamboo server machine, while a remote agent runs on any other machine in the network that Bamboo can access. You can run any number of agents on your remote machine, just ensure that each instance is pointed to a separate Bamboo-Home directory. You can read more about distributed builds if you require more information. To sum up:

  • Local agents run as part of the Bamboo server
  • Local agents run in the server's process, i.e. in the same JVM as the Bamboo server
  • Remote agents are computers other than the Bamboo server that run the remote agent tool
  • Each remote agent runs in its own process, i.e. has its own JAV 
  • An elastic agent is a remote agent that runs in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

I lost my password!

No worries! You can follow this help document to edit your administrator's database entry to reset your password: restoring passwords to recover admin users. Otherwise, you could uninstall Bamboo (including deleting the Bamboo-home directory and dropping the database) and install again. You would then have to set the administrator user's details in step 6 of the Bamboo Setup Wizard. 

How do I run an SSH Script in Bamboo?

After you write an SSH script, you can use the "Script" executable for your Task. For the content of your script, a fair number of resources are available online. For example, here is one from Stack Overflow: how to use SSH to run shell scripts on a remote machine.

What repositories does Bamboo support?

 Bamboo can check out source code from the following repositories:

  • CVS
  • Subversion
  • Perforce
  • Mercurial
  • Git

Bamboo also has connectors that can link Bamboo to Bitbucket or Github.

 

How can I build on a specific remote agent?

To ensure that a particular build plan will always utilise a remote agent with a specified capability, you can configure the following:

 

Can I use Bamboo with a non-Java project?

 Bamboo is a programming-language independent tool that can be used to automate any build. As long as your build process can be started from a command line, Bamboo can run it.

Bamboo contains support for builds that use:

  • Ant
  • Maven/Maven2
  • make
  • Command line(DOS, any *nix shell)
  • MSBuild
  • devenv.exe
  • NAnt
  • Grails

Bamboo supports any xUnit-compliant framework as well, including:

  • JUnit
  • Selenium
  • JWebUnit
  • NUnit
  • PHPUnit
  • and dozens more.

Could I get some resources on setting up release management?

Here are some resources for setting up release management with Bamboo:

How can I integrate JIRA and Confluence with Bamboo?

Two great plugins exist to help this very cause! 

Can you tell me more about functional tests, reports, and notifications on Bamboo?

This all depends on what kind of functional tests you'd like to execute. You can run cross browser functional tests from Bamboo with Selenium, for example, by using the Bamboo Sauce On Demand Plugin. Learn more about Selenium and Bamboo here: Atlassian Summit 2010: Bamboo and Selenium Web Application Testing.

More generally speaking, Bamboo provides a convenient summary of all the tests that were run when a particular build was executed, as well as full details of any errors. This is useful when you are investigating what caused a build to fail. See Viewing Test Results for a Build.

You can view a test's history to see:

  • The occasions when the test had failed. This can be useful when investigating what code changes were related to a failed test. 
  • The test's running time, and whether the duration is increasing or decreasingi across builds. 

Bamboo provides a summary of test results across all of a Job's builds. This helps you to:

  • Troubleshoot by identifying which tests fail most frequently, and which tests take longest to fix.
  • Manage your build duration by identifying the plan's slowest running tests.
  • Ensure quality by monitoring the number of tests over time: are your test cases growing with the code base?

There are many reports that you can generate, such as the 'Number of Tests' report. See Generating Reports across Multiple Plans for a list of available reports that span plans. There are also several views to help you see an author's impact:

Users can be notified via email and/or instant message when tests pass or fail, depending on your configuration. Here is how to configure notifications for a Plan and its Jobs and change your notification preferences.