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Installation

To install Jenkins Job Builder, run:

sudo python setup.py install

The OpenStack project uses Puppet to manage its infrastructure systems, including Jenkins. If you use Puppet, you can use the OpenStack Jenkins module to install Jenkins Job Builder.

Documentation

Documentation is included in the doc folder. To generate docs locally execute the command:

tox -e docs

The generated documentation is then available under doc/build/html/index.html.

Unit Tests

Unit tests have been included and are in the tests folder. We recently started including unit tests as examples in our documentation so to keep the examples up to date it is very important that we include unit tests for every module. To run the unit tests, execute the command:

tox -e py27

Note: View tox.ini to run tests on other versions of Python.

Test Coverage

To measure test coverage, execute the command:

tox -e cover

Configuration File

After installation, you will need to create a configuration file. By default, jenkins-jobs looks in /etc/jenkins_jobs/jenkins_jobs.ini but you may specify an alternative location when running jenkins-jobs. The file should have the following format:

../../etc/jenkins_jobs.ini-sample

job_builder section

ignore_cache: (Optional) If set to True, Jenkins Job Builder won't use any cache.
keep_descriptions: By default jenkins-jobs will overwrite the jobs descriptions even if no description has been defined explicitly. When this option is set to True, that behavior changes and it will only overwrite the description if you specified it in the yaml. False by default.
include_path: (Optional) Can be set to a ':' delimited list of paths, which jenkins job builder will search for any files specified by the custom application yaml tags 'include', 'include-raw' and 'include-raw-escaped'.
recursive: (Optional) If set to True, jenkins job builder will search for job definition files recursively
exclude: (Optional) If set to a list of values separated by ':', these paths will be excluded from the list of paths to be processed when searching recursively. Values containing no / will be matched against directory names at all levels, those starting with / will be considered absolute, while others containing a / somewhere other than the start of the value will be considered relative to the starting path.
allow_duplicates: (Optional) By default jenkins-jobs will abort any time a duplicate macro, template, job-group or job name is encountered as it cannot establish the correct one to use. When this option is set to True, only a warning is emitted.
allow_empty_variables: (Optional) When expanding strings, by default jenkins-jobs will raise an exception if there's a key in the string, that has not been declared on the yamls. Setting this options to True, will replace it with the empty string, allowing you to use those strings without having to define all the keys it might be using.

jenkins section

user: This should be the name of a user previously defined in Jenkins. Appropriate user permissions must be set under the Jenkins security matrix: under the Global group of permissions, check Read, then under the Job group of permissions, check Create, Delete, Configure and finally Read.
password: The API token for the user specified. You can get this through the Jenkins management interface under People -> username -> Configure and then click the Show API Token button.
url: The base URL for your Jenkins installation.
query_plugins_info: Whether to query the Jenkins instance for plugin info when a configuration file is provided. If a configuration file is not provided jenkins-jobs will ignore this setting and skip querying for plugin information. True by default.

Running

After it's installed and configured, you can invoke Jenkins Job Builder by running jenkins-jobs. You won't be able to do anything useful just yet without a configuration which is discussed in the next section.

Test Mode

Once you have a configuration defined, you can run the job builder in test mode.

If you want to run a simple test with just a single YAML job definition file and see the XML output on stdout:

jenkins-jobs test /path/to/foo.yaml

You can also pass JJB a directory containing multiple job definition files:

jenkins-jobs test /path/to/defs -o /path/to/output

which will write XML files to the output directory for all of the jobs defined in the defs directory.

Updating Jobs

When you're satisfied with the generated XML from the test, you can run:

jenkins-jobs update /path/to/defs

which will upload the job definitions to Jenkins if needed. Jenkins Job Builder maintains, for each host, a cache¹ of previously configured jobs, so that you can run that command as often as you like, and it will only update the jobs configurations in Jenkins if the defined definitions has changed since the last time it was run. Note: if you modify a job directly in Jenkins, jenkins-jobs will not know about it and will not update it.

To update a specific list of jobs, simply pass them as additional arguments after the job definition path. To update Foo1 and Foo2 run:

jenkins-jobs update /path/to/defs Foo1 Foo2

Passing Multiple Paths

It is possible to pass multiple paths to JJB using colons as a path separator on *nix systems and semi-colons on Windows systems. For example:

jenkins-jobs test /path/to/global:/path/to/instance:/path/to/instance/project

This helps when structuring directory layouts as you may selectively include directories in different ways to suit different needs. If you maintain multiple Jenkins instances suited to various needs you may want to share configuration between those instances (global). Furthermore, there may be various ways you would like to structure jobs within a given instance.

Recursive Searching of Paths

In addition to passing multiple paths to JJB it is also possible to enable recursive searching to process all yaml files in the tree beneath each path. For example:

For a tree:
  /path/
    to/
      defs/
        ci_jobs/
        release_jobs/
      globals/
        macros/
        templates/

jenkins-jobs update -r /path/to/defs:/path/to/globals

JJB will search defs/ci_jobs, defs/release_jobs, globals/macros and globals/templates in addition to the defs and globals trees.

Excluding Paths

To allow a complex tree of jobs where some jobs are managed differently without needing to explicitly provide each path, the recursive path processing supports excluding paths based on absolute paths, relative paths and patterns. For example:

For a tree:
  /path/
    to/
      defs/
        ci_jobs/
          manual/
        release_jobs/
          manual/
        qa_jobs/
      globals/
        macros/
        templates/
        special/

jenkins-jobs update -r -x man*:./qa_jobs -x /path/to/defs/globals/special \
  /path/to/defs:/path/to/globals

JJB search the given paths, ignoring the directories qa_jobs, ci_jobs/manual, release_jobs/manual, and globals/special when building the list of yaml files to be processed. Absolute paths are denoted by starting from the root, relative by containing the path separator, and patterns by having neither. Patterns use simple shell globing to match directories.

Deleting Jobs

Jenkins Job Builder supports deleting jobs from Jenkins.

To delete a specific job:

jenkins-jobs delete Foo1

To delete a list of jobs, simply pass them as additional arguments after the command:

jenkins-jobs delete Foo1 Foo2

The update command includes a delete-old option to remove obsolete jobs. Obsolete jobs are all jobs not managed by JJB, even jobs which were never managed by JJB:

jenkins-jobs update --delete-old /path/to/defs

There is also a command to delete all jobs. WARNING: Use with caution:

jenkins-jobs delete-all

Globbed Parameters

Jenkins job builder supports globbed parameters to identify jobs from a set of definition files. This feature only supports JJB managed jobs.

To update jobs that only have 'foo' in their name:

jenkins-jobs update ./myjobs \*foo\*

To delete jobs that only have 'foo' in their name:

jenkins-jobs delete --path ./myjobs \*foo\*

Command Reference

jenkins-jobs --help

jenkins-jobs test --help

jenkins-jobs update --help

jenkins-jobs delete-all --help

jenkins-jobs delete --help

Footnotes

The cache default location is at ~/.cache/jenkins_jobs, which can be overridden by setting the XDG_CACHE_HOME environment variable.↩︎

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