What exactly are teamcity artifacts?

Question

A noob question, but googling and stack overflow search didn't seem to yield an answer.

Can someone explain what exactly are teamcity artifacts?

From the documentation

"Typically these include distribution packages, WAR files, reports,
 log files, etc. When creating a build configuration, you specify artifacts 
of your build at the General Settings page.

It doesn't really explain to me what an artifact is. A .Net oriented answer will be very helpful. I have a couple of builds already working on teamcity, but I'm not sure what exactly I would need an artifact for ?

thank you

Answer 1

Artifacts are the files you want the TeamCity server to store so that they can be downloaded after the build has finished. They will be downloadable from the TeamCity dashboard from each build.

For a .NET project you might choose the store the output of the compiler (i.e. .exe and .dll files), and the log files from running unit tests. You might just have a Windows Installer package (i.e. .msi).

It is completely up to you what gets stored for your specific needs. Just note that build artifacts do take up disk space on the TeamCity server, so if yours are large you'll want to configure the Build History Clean-up rules.