What is the Project Build Library?

The Project Build Library (PBL) is a place in TeamForge Lab Managementwhere you can store, share, search, and download the products of software builds. Each project has its own Project Build Library.

The PBL also offers a auditing and reporting capabilities so that you can see who is uploading to and downloading from your projects.

The PBL is not a version control tool. Unlike Subversion, the PBL is optimized for storing large binary files, and files in the PBL may be permanently deleted. This makes it ideal for storing the results of software builds, especially the many daily builds and other intermediate work products that precede a final release.

People can download from the PBL with any HTTPS-capable web client. Uploading files to the PBL can be done with a cross-platform command-line client distributed along with TeamForge Lab Management. The PBL client can be downloaded from CollabNet, and is also distributed by default on each TeamForge Lab Management node.

Files can be downloaded with any SSL-capable web browser using basic authentication (username and password) over an SSL-encrypted browser session.
Within each project's Build Library, files can be designated either as Public or Private. This designation governs who can download files from the project's Build Library.
- To download from the Public portion of a project's build library, you must be a member of the TeamForge site.
- To download from the Private portion of a project's build library, you must be a member of the project.
The PBL stores some metadata about each file, such as its md5 checksum, a user-specified description, who uploaded the file and when, and the number of times that file has been downloaded.
Uploading is done via a special cross-platform, command-line, open-source client. A special client is needed to interface with the TeamForge Lab Management server and provide all the needed metadata to the PBL. We also publish the specs of the API, if users want to develop their own clients.
Uploading files, and other write operations that change files (e.g., file move or remove) or file metadata (e.g., change the description associated with a file) can be done by any user with "TeamForge Lab Management - Root Access" privileges or better in the project.