Configuring Projects, Plans, Stages and Jobs

Projects

A project is a collection of Plans. Projects enable you to easily group and identify plans which are logically related to each other. They are especially useful when generating reports across multiple Plans.

Note that creating a new project only requires defining the Project Name and Project Key, which is (optionally) done as part of the process of creating a new plan.

Plans

A Plan defines everything about your entire build process. Plans:

• consist of one or more Jobs, which are organised into one or more Stages;
• contains a single 'Default Job' in a single Stage, after creating a new Plan;
• define default settings for what gets built by Jobs in the Plan (i.e. the 'default source repository');
• define how the Plan's build is triggered;
• define who will be notified of the Job's build result;
• define who has permission to view and perform various actions on the Plan and its Jobs.

Diagram showing the relationship between plans, stages, jobs and tasks:

Stages

Stages group (or 'map') Jobs to individual steps within an entire Plan's build process. For example, you may have an overall Plan build process that comprises a compilation step, followed by several test steps, followed by a deployment step. You can create separate Bamboo Stages to represent each of these steps. Stages have the following characteristics:

• A Stage may contain one or more Jobs;
• Depending on the availability of Bamboo agents, all Jobs in a Stage can be processed in parallel;
• Stages are processed consecutively within a Plan, one at a time;
• All Jobs in a Stage must be built and succeed before Bamboo builds any Jobs in the next Stage. If any Job fails in a Stage, no further Stages in the Plan will be processed and the Plan's build will fail.

Each new Plan created in Bamboo contains at least one Stage (to house the Default Job) and is known as the 'Default Stage'. Stages can only be configured by Bamboo administrators.

Jobs

A Job is a single build unit within a Plan. One or more Jobs can be organised into one or more Stages. A Job is made up of one or more Tasks. A Job defines:

• what gets built (i.e. the source code repository) — this can be a custom, Job-specific source repository or the 'default source repository' of the Plan that contains this Job;
• which agent capabilities are required for the build (based on Job-specific requirements and requirements of the Job's Tasks);
• what Tasks make up the Job and the order in which they are executed;
• what artifacts the Job's build will produce;
• any labels with which the build result or build artifacts will be tagged;

Each new Plan created in Bamboo contains at least one Job known as the 'Default Job'.

Tasks

A Task is an operation that is run sequentially within a Job on a Bamboo working directory. Tasks may make use of an executable if required. Once a Task is defined in the Bamboo system, it can then be specified in Jobs by a Plan administrator. A Job can be configured to execute a number of Tasks, on the same working directory. For example, before executing a Maven goal, the user could substitute specific files within the working directory, substitute version numbers, checkout Source Repositories or execute a Script.

Builds

A build is the execution of either a Plan or a Job. The execution of a Plan is referred to as a 'Plan build' and that of a Job is a 'Job build'.

Each plan's build results are stored in a subdirectory under your 'Build Directory' (see Locating Important Directories and Files).

Related Topics

• Configuring a Plan
• Configuring a Stage
• Configuring a Job