How can I start a bamboo job with an empty working directory (without SCM repo)?

[Axel Tetzlaff]

I have a job that operates on files from a shared artifact by a previous stage. The job generates new files (ruby -> Gemfile.lock).

I would assume every build starts with a clean working dir, but it looks like the generated files from the previous build are still there. How can I ensure that every build of this job automatically starts in a clean state?

[Bob Swift · Accepted solution]

See https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BAM-11714

[Jason Monsorno]

Each job under the configuration -> Miscellaneous has a "Clean working directory after each build" option. Setting this option later in the process, now that you have unclean working directories, becuase is cleans the directory after the build and is a pain because you'll have to cycle through all your agents with "bad" builds to get it working. If you can spare the down-time you can clear the entire build-dir folder (in bamboo-home\xml-data) to delete all your working copies once.

[Bob Swift]

While that option may save disk space, it is more important to have a "before" option that makes builds work correctly ;).

[François-Marie de Jouvencel]

I just execute a script with the single line: "rm -R *" before anything else. This allows me to have a clean build folder before the tests, and a dirty one afterwards for analysis. 

I'm really not too happy about this solution, but since there is nothing of value on the bamboo machine I don't care if it messes up 

[Bob Swift]

Unfortunately, that also clears out any artifacts that are copied into the working directory

[Axel Tetzlaff]

This does solve the problem in case of successful build but makes it impossible to debug a failed build.

Cleaning the xml-data directory in a distributed environmen with several parralles plans is not an option (and does feel quite hacky too ;-) )

[Jason Monsorno]

I haven't tried it in a Job yet, but maybe you can follow the Deployment workflow. You can't use their clean task but you can write your own then use the Artifact download which is available to Jobs/tasks. I'm using V5.1.0 but you'd need atleast V5.0.0