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).
Related
I am designing the batch workflow with SCDF on Windows OS. When I test the code on my local machine, I deploy and run the Spring batch job jar locally by registering the jar using file URL. The problem is that whenever I want to rebuild my batch job jar, I cannot delete the jar that has already registered on the SCDF server as the OS warned me that the jar is being used by a Java program (even when the batch job is not running at that time).
It is quite inconvenient for developers to shut down the SCDF server every time when they want to rebuild the jar and replace the existing jar. Is there any workaround, or am I missing any configuration?
Thanks in advance for the advice.
I see this is an inconvenience but unfortunately this is expected when using file:// based resources. One alternative is to install your app as maven artifact in your local and refer them as maven:// based resources.
I have a Jenkins setup running in production, I want to automate jenkins setup(installation) along with all the jobs that are setup in jenkins.
One crude way I can think of is to copy the whole jobs directory to the new Jenkins setup.
I want to know how other people in industry do deal with this problem.
I have used the plugin Thinbackup to move jobs, users, and plugins. You can make a full backup and restore it to the new server. The plugin is not perfect and is up for adoption. I had issues with the restore. I ended up using the plugin only for creating the archive, but then I copied manually the folders (users, jobs, plugins, nodes, email-templates, secrets, JENKINS_HOME files) from the archive to the new server.
Before creating the archive or copying the jobs, ensure that no more than 30 builds per job are kept, this will keep your archive small. I have seen 5000+ builds per job, which were totally unnecessary and were blocking the creation of the archive.
When you create or restore the archive, or copy files, the server should be in quiet mode, no builds should be executed.
http://<jenkins.server>/quietDown
After you copy the files or restore the archive, you should restart Jenkins or even better, restart the server.
Another option is to use RSync as mentioned here. I am not sure what is the OS of your Jenkins server. If it is Linux you can check out this guide that I have written.
I'm using Jenkins v1.546, hosted on a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 machine.
I've set up a fairly simple job for building a Maven Java project. It polls the SCM with no schedule and picks up remote build triggers, requiring an authentication token. It uses Subversion and performs clean checkouts with svn update. Additionally, it has a post-build step that archives some build artifacts (i.e., the resulting WAR and WSDLs).
The issue I'm experiencing is that the builds that it stores on the filesystem itself contain invalid characters in their filenames. This causes our automatic backup process to blow up, it being unable to alter or remove those directories/files with the '$'. I myself cannot move/delete those folders or files either, but if I rename it and remove the $, then things work fine. Oh, and if I try to follow one of these links with the $ in it, it doesn't resolve. None of the other jobs seem to do this - just my job, of course. Anyone know why this may be occurring and what I can do to resolve this?
I've attached multiple screenshots that show the bad filename and my Jenkins job setup. I had to white out some company information. If I can provide any additional information to help troubleshoot this, just let me know.
Also, as an update, I did some additional research, looking through the changelogs for each released version of Jenkins since my version (latest is 1.557). I saw three possible issues in the changelogs that could be related, but it's hard for me to tell. I cannot simply upgrade our Jenkins to test out this theory, since I'll need to provide a reason for upgrading beyond a hunch.
https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-21023
https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-20534
https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-21958
The $ is a perfectly valid character in Windows directory name. You can manually make a folder with it, and delete it without any problems.
The com.company$moduleName syntax is used by Jenkins Maven-style job to separate modules of your build. If you don't see this structure for other people's jobs, it is because they are either not building a Maven job, or they don't have multiple modules in a single job.
What is strange though it that these are symlinks (I don't see that in my environment). It is possible that the location that is referenced by the symlink is deleted, but the link remains. In this case, you would not be able to navigate to that location through the link (this is what you are experiencing)
Is it possible that your backup software is deleting the target directories before deleting the links?
In any case, do a simple dir on the directory with the links to see what they link to. And then verify those target locations exists. If they don't, you need to figure out who/what is deleting the links' targets
Edit:
This seems to be more related to the issue that you are facing. Unfortunately, it's marked as "unresolved"
https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-20725
The issue stems from the fact that the symlinks are referencing to targets with / instead of \
My Maven plugin (not Maven version) is 2.6. See if upgrading your Maven plugin in Jenkins will help you. Also, I am running Maven 3.2.2 from the automatic installers. Try with that, as I don't see symlinks in my modules.
I have a Jenkins Server (1.510) on Win 2008 with ~100 jobs.
After installing and then uninstalling the CloudBees (Plugin_1, Plugin_2) set of plugins + restart I have the following issues:
half of the Jobs are now missing.
many plugins are not functioning well, for example the green-balls plugin is not working and also the entry to launch the backup plugin is missing
many built in Jenkins buttons such the new "Credentials" is missing from the "Jenkins Configure" Menu.
Looking at the FS, i still see all the jobs.
I already tried :
Using the reload configuration
Reinstalling the plugins
Reinstalling Jenkins with the same version once again
Still the jobs are missing
Any idea how to solve it?
Thanks,
Doron
When job is loaded, many of the related Java classes get instantiated. If instantiation fails, usually because some plugin has been removed and that class is no longer available at all, then the job is hidden.
I suspect you have accidentally removed some other plugin too.
Note: Before actually doing anything, take full backup! Easiest is to backup entire Jenkins folder, where the jobs, configuration etc reside.
Easiest solution might be to just install Jenkins from scratch, install the plugins you do need (see below for troubleshooting if you're missing some), then copy the jobs subfolder to the new Jenkins. It might be best to do any configuration under Manage Jenkins by hand, but you can also just try copying the related XML config files.
If you are missing a plugin and can't figure out which one, you should look at jenkins.out.log and jenkins.err.log log files and search for exceptions happening after Jenkins is started. That may give you a clue on what plugin you are missing.
You can also try editing the job XML files to remove build steps you identified from the exceptions (remember to take backups first!), then restart Jenkins or select Reload configuration from disk from Manage Jenkins page.
If not solved, but you find relevant-looking exceptions or something else interesting, please update the question with details.
After I upgraded Jenkins, one of my jobs disappeared. I found out that although my job directory still existed, the config.xml file inside had somehow gone missing.
I restored this file from a backup, after updating all the plugins that needed updating, and reloaded the configuration, and the job reappeared in Jenkins.
I am on a redhat linux box. I recently updated Jenkins to version 1.509 only to find that after doing so it has "forgotten" two of my jobs/projects. The jobs can still be found on my Jenkins machine under /var/lib/jenkins/jobs, but they no longer show up in the Jenkins GUI. I attempted to re-create them based off the configuration file I have, but I am not confident I have totally re-created the functionality they had.
I also tried to copy the job and or rename it hoping that would get jenkins to see it, but no luck. I had tried cp -r /var/lib/jenkins/jobs/JOB1 /var/lib/jenkins/jobs/JOB2. I also restarted the service a number of times. Finally I updated all of my plugins on the off chance that was somehow related.
So my question is "How can I get Jenkins to notice these jobs?" or failing that "can I run these jobs from in the terminal?"
NOTE: I am not discouraging others from upgrading Jenkins. After I upgraded Jenkins did complain about a number of things which I didn't pay enough attention to which I believe got me into this mess in the first place.
If I were you, I would try the Jenkins CLI (from $JENKINS_URL/cli) and use the create-job command and feed the job configuration file to the cli's stdin.
If that does not help, I would inspect Jenkins log files (you are saving stdout and stderr of Jenkins somewhere, right?) for any errors or clues. If the job failed to load because of some tag that you can guess is provided by a plugin, try to remove that part from the config file.
If that does not help, I would upgrade Jenkins. I think there might be some fixes related to this in the LTS version changelog since 1.509.
And above all... if I were you, I would start making backups of the job configuration files.
I regularly back up the global config.xml, all the job config.xml files and all the plugins. Using these I can set up my Jenkins from scratch. And I do that to set up a test instance where I try any plugin or Jenkins core upgrade. If I see no problems after running a few of the trickiest builds, I know I can upgrade the production instance with much more confidence.