If I need to backup jenkins configurations, do you have good recommendations? I'm researching and found https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Backup+Plugin but I want to be able to automate the whole process
The way I like to do it is as a git repo. Init the repo in the JENKINS_HOME directory. Add a .gitignore file to eliminate the workspace directory(s). Optionally, you can ignore the log and/or logs directories. The plugins directory can probably be rebuilt entirely and doesn't need to be backed up, but it might make sense to dump a directory listing of the plugins directory to a file, or better yet, hit this url and dump that content to a file before you commit changes:
http://jenkinsurl/pluginManager/api/json?depth=1&pretty=true.
You can also ignore the caches directory and the war directory.
Setup a cron job, or a job in Jenkins to commit the changes the git repo on a regular basis. Even put a Jenkinsfile in the root of JENKINS_HOME and use that as your pipeline job to backup itself.
You can use Gearman plugin as an alternative, it supports backup as well as failover in the evnt of an outage.
Related
I want to take the backup of jenkins confuguration in case if I lode my machine. I am using the thinBackup plugin provided by jenkins. It has an option where I provide the path to folder where I want to take the backup.
Now the problem is I want to specify the folder on another machine, as it makes sense to have backup on different machine, how do I specifythe path to that folder? Do I have to specify as if
abc#12.34.567.890:path/to/folder?
I am new to jenkins so any help would be appreciated.
Thin backup performs just copies of jenkins configuration files in a specific folder for convenience. Is up to you to store it to scm or other machines, but it can be done with some simple script that upload your backup zip if exists
I want to do an automatically backup of the JENKINS_HOME but due to file size I just want to copy the config.xml and /jobs.
Is it possible to restore Jenkins if needed with just those two things? How is the process to do it? Just replacing the config.xml and /jobs and restarting the service?
Thanks.
Consider using the Jenkins SCM Sync configuration plugin - it allows to back up all your Jenkins settings (including job configurations) to git or SVN. Also, version control means you'll have an easier time debugging problems caused by configuration changes or to revert to an older configuration.
I am trying to automate Jenkins Upgrades so they do not have to be hands on. Some documentation recommends creating a batch file with instructions on the machine running Jenkins, and create a scheduled task to run the batch job. The site I found with a batch file is here, where it says:
It does delete the complete exploded war file from the deployment location, so be careful if you save any configuration files to that directory.
What configuration file would I have to worry about? No one I've talked to at my company knows of any configuration files held there, and they seem to think we have a pretty default setup, so what could I look for manually that would tell me whether or not I should be concerned?
We are running Jenkins on a Windows virtual box, I believe with Jenkins running as a service.
Alternatively, if the above method is not the easiest or best way to automate Jenkins upgrades, does anyone know a better way?
You can ignore this warning. I've never seen anything storing configuration files in that directory. It is intended to be used as a cache only.
If unsure, check your existing war directory for any files with timestamps newer than the installation time.
Here, on a busy Jenkins master, no files have been added or modified there over a period of several months (since initial war file explosion at installation time).
I am in Jenkins and using ArtifactDeployer. The console output tells me that the remote repo is http:// myrepo but all it does is create a new folder in my base directory which I also specify in this plugin. It correctly finds only one file to copy but strangely just creates a new directory and copies it in there. I thought this would enable me to deploy artifacts to another server... Can I do that?
No you can not do that with artifacts deployer but there are other ones you can use - read below:
Jenkins provides by default a feature for archiving artifacts generated by the build of a Jenkins Job. These artifacts are archived in the JENKINS_HOME directory. However, this directory contains also tool configurations (global and job configurations). Therefore, there is no separation between infrastructure data, jobs data and generated elements. It is often considered to be a bad practice and it doesn't help to manage it from an administrator point of view.
Unfortunately, it's not possible to extend the 'archived artifacts' feature to archive artifacts in a location other than JENKINS_HOME.
The main goal of the ArtifactDeployer plugin is to archive artifacts in your desired locations (other than JENKINS_HOME directory).
There are many Jenkins plugins close to ArtifactDeployer such as CopyArtifact plugin or CopyArchiver plugin for publishing artifacts from Jenkins resources (from the current workspace, from the old builds of the same job or other jobs, ...) to remote locations with the protocol file://
There are also others plugins for managing other protocols such as ftp://, ssh:///.
We have a Jenkins master-slave model. Each job that is being run on slaves require a certain amount of configuration files. These files must be copied from master to each slave before the build step. So far I have been able to accomplish this with the Config File Provider Plugin. The drawback of this plugin is that it doesn't support folders, I would like to be able to put the configuration files for slave1 in the folder slave1 and so on. Now I have a huge list of files in the dropdown menu when creating a job and asked to provide configuration files.
This plugin comes with something handy: the configuration files can be edited via the web interface.
On the other hand Jenkins provides a userContent folder on the master accessible via http://[jenkins-server]/userContent that resolves my need for folders, but I haven't found a way to edit these files from the provided web interface.
I must mention that the master is a remote machine and I don't want to connect to it everytime I need to modify a file there. Is there any way to edit the files in the userContent folder, or to organize the files uploaded to the Config File Plugin into folders?
Thanks!
If possible put all the configuration into your SCM system and allow Jenkins to fetch them when needed/as they change.
Then your configuration files are managed just like your source code. As a bonus you can add a new node easily and developers can access and use they configuration files to test their build.
Supporting evidence:
Martin Fowler
Andrew Binstock
Darryl Bowler
If you have environment specific config files you can either load all of the individual config files into into your SCM system (this becomes unmanageable if you have a lot). Alternatively you can still store them in your SCM system and then do some combination of scripting with Jenkins parameters to update them on the fly.