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Configuration File

After installation, you will need to create a configuration file. By default, jenkins-jobs looks for ~/.config/jenkins_jobs/jenkins_jobs.ini, <script directory>/jenkins_jobs.ini or /etc/jenkins_jobs/jenkins_jobs.ini (in that order), 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 when 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 in the input YAML files. Setting this option 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.
timeout: (Optional) The connection timeout (in seconds) to the Jenkins server. By default this is set to the system configured socket timeout.
query_plugins_info: Whether to query the Jenkins instance for plugin info. If no configuration files are found (either in the default paths or given through the command-line), jenkins-jobs will skip querying for plugin information. True by default.

hipchat section

send-as: This is the hipchat user name that will be used when sending notifications.
authtoken: The API token necessary to send messages to hipchat. This can be generated in the hipchat web interface by a user with administrative access for your organization. This authtoken is set for each job individually; the JJB Hipchat Plugin does not currently support setting different tokens for different projects, so the token you use will have to be scoped such that it can be used for any room your jobs might be configured to notify. For more information on this topic, please see the Hipchat API Documentation

stash section

username: This is the stash user name that will be used to connect to stash when using the stash publisher plugin and not defining it in the yaml part.
password: This is the related password that will be used with the stash username when using the stash publisher plugin and not defining it in the yaml part.

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; that 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 the job names as additional arguments after the job definition path. To update Foo1 and Foo2 run:

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

You can also enable the parallel execution of the program passing the workers option with a value of 0, 2, or higher. Use 0 to run as many workers as cores in the host that runs it, and 2 or higher to specify the number of workers to use:

jenkins-jobs update --workers 0 /path/to/defs

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 will 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:

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

Obsolete jobs are all jobs not managed by JJB, even jobs which were never managed by JJB.

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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