Jenkins - Propagate system property to ant task - ant

Dos it exist a way to propagate java system property from Tomcat to jenkins ant task?
Particularly I would like to propagate catalina.home property to ant task. When trying catalina.home=${catalina.home} I get error Property catalina.home was circularly defined.

so you want catalina.home of the tomcat that's running jenkins passed into your ant build?
hmmm... I'm not sure it's goign to work, but try setting the catalina.home property to the value of the CATALINA_HOME environment variable:
catalina.home=${evn.CATALINA_HOME}
It likely won't work, you'll want to see what you set CATALINA_HOME environment variable is and just pass that into your ant build:
ant -Dcatalina.home="/usr/share/tomcat7

I don't think you have direct access from your job configuration to your system properties. You will need to write your own plugin to read out the system properties.
Check if you have CATALINA_HOME available. If you do, pass it into ant (ant plugin has a field for that) or set it within your ant-script like thekbb suggested. catalina.home=${evn.CATALINA_HOME}

Related

How to declare a global variable in Jenkins and use it in an MSBuild task within each individual project

I am converting our CI platform from CruiseControl to Jenkins, and can't seem to figure something out that seems like it should be relatively simple to do (Disclaimer - I'm no CI or build automation expert, but this was dumped into my lap and I find it interesting)
In CruiseControl, I am able to declare variables like this:
<cb:define rootdir="J:\SOURCES\" />
<cb:define logdir="J:\SOURCES\buildlogs" />
<cb:define iisdir="J:\IIS\" />
<cb:define artifacts="artifacts\" />
Then use them as part of an MSBuild task
<msbuild>
<executable>C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe</executable>
<workingDirectory>$(rootdir)$(ProjectName)</workingDirectory>
<projectFile>$(ProjectName).sln</projectFile>
<buildArgs>/p:BuildDate="1";OutDir="$(iisdir)$(ProjectName)\bin\\";WebProjectOutputDir="$(iisdir)$(ProjectName)\\"</buildArgs>
<targets>Rebuild;$(ProjectName)</targets>
<timeout>180</timeout>
<logger>C:\Program Files (x86)\CruiseControl.NET\server\ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.MsBuild.dll</logger>
</msbuild>
If the root or IIS directories change, it can easily be applied to all projects at once. We have ~60 projects setup, so doing this project by project would be very time consuming. Migrating this to Jenkins, the MSBuild command line arguments now look like this (partial sample but includes what is relevant):
OutDir="J:\IIS\ProjectName\bin\\";WebProjectOutputDir="J:\IIS\ProjectName\\"
The IIS directory is hard coded. I need that to be something more like this:
OutDir="${IIS_DIR}\ProjectName\bin\\";WebProjectOutputDir="${ITEM_ROOTDIR}\ProjectName\\"
Is there a way to do that? I tried the configuration slicing plugin, which is useful, but doesn't fit this need from what I see
You can do this with built-in Jenkins' functionality:
Then you need to expand your variable. This, actually, depends on where you would use it.
For example: %MSBuild% and %IIS_DIR% for "Execute windows batch command" build step. Other build steps (and plugins) may use it differently.
For global variables, you need EnvInject plugin. This allows you (among other things) to setup variables at the Global (node) level, at job level or as a step. You can set variables directly, or from properties file, or from scripts.
Once set, the variables are available as environment variables to the rest of Jenkins and its steps (within scope).
For passing arguments to MSBuild, when you configure an MSBuild step, there is an option to pass "Command line arguments" in the format /p:Param=Value.
The "value" could be an environment variable. On Windows environment you would reference it as %myvar%
So, if you configure a global GLOBAL_IIS_DIR=C:\path\to\IIS using EnvInject, you can then reference it on command line with /p:IIS_DIR=%GLOBAL_IIS_DIR%

How to override user.home property of ant from Jenkins server?

Hi I need some help in overriding the user.home property of ant from Jenkins. I created a simple job on jenkins that runs a build script on a slave machine of the master. One of the tasks of the scripts is to use the user.home property of ant and access certain files. The problem is that when I try to echo this property from the command line of the slave machine, I see C:\Users\Administrator but when I run the exact the same script from the Jenkins server I see C:\ . This difference is causing the build to fail on Jenkins. Can anyone please tell me what is the reason for this difference? Is there any way I can override this?
I tried having a property called user.home in the config file of my job but it doesn't seem to pick it up. Another interesting point is that when I changed the user.home value to some gibberish in the config file and run ant from command line on the slave, it still picks it up as C:\Users\Administrator
I am using ant 1.7.1 and Jenkins 1.598
You likely have jenkins running as a different ID than Administrator. Which is a good thing.
Properties in ant are immutable so you can specify those properties from the ant plugin in jenkins and they'll override any other values. (click advanced under the invoke ant buildstep to see the properties text box).
I'd recommend you not override user.home but rather refactor your ant so there is a config.location property that defaults to user.home but can be overidden to whatever you want from jenkins. It just seems unnatural to ovrride user.home

Retrieval of Jenkins environment variables while invoking ANT

I am invoking a windows batch command from Jenkins, after i get the latest version of my project from SVN. the windows batch command just performs certain file copying, after the all the files are retrieved from SVN and runs an ANT build. In the ANT build process, i am generating a JSP file where i have tried to capture the in the following fashion.
%BUILD_TAG%-%BUILD_NUMBER%-%BUILD_ID%-%SVN_REVISION%
Unfortunately none of this information is understood by the build process and it just writes %BUILD_TAG%-%BUILD_NUMBER%-%BUILD_ID%-%SVN_REVISION% into the file.
Could you please let me know if there is a way to capture these information into a file in the way i am trying to do? if not, could you direct me on how these information could be captured into a JSP file during the process that we are following?
BUILD_TAG, SVN_REVISION, etc are all environment variables that are present during a Jenkins build, and to use them in Ant, you would use them as any other environment variable from Ant
First, add a line:
<property environment="env"/>
Then you can reference any environment variable with this prefix, like:
${env.VAR_NAME}
So in your case, you'd do:
${env.BUILD_TAG}-${env.BUILD_NUMBER}-${env.BUILD_ID}-${env.SVN_REVISION}

Jenkins - How to access BUILD_NUMBER environment variable

Are Jenkins parameters case-sensitive? I have a parametrized build which needs an ant parameter named "build_parameter" to be set before the build. When I try to access the ${BUILD_NUMBER} set by Jenkins, I get the value set for the ant parameter. If the build parameters are not case sensitive, can anyone suggest me a work around to this issue? I cannot change the build parameter name as I will have to change my build scripts (which is not an option). Thanks!
To Answer your first question, Jenkins variables are case sensitive. However, if you are writing a windows batch script, they are case insensitive, because Windows doesn't care about the case.
Since you are not very clear about your setup, let's make the assumption that you are using an ant build step to fire up your ant task. Have a look at the Jenkins documentation (same page that Adarsh gave you, but different chapter) for an example on how to make Jenkins variables available to your ant task.
EDIT:
Hence, I will need to access the environmental variable ${BUILD_NUMBER} to construct the URL.
Why don't you use $BUILD_URL then? Isn't it available in the extended email plugin?
Assuming I am understanding your question and setup correctly,
If you're trying to use the build number in your script, you have two options:
1) When calling ant, use: ant -Dbuild_parameter=${BUILD_NUMBER}
2) Change your script so that:
<property environment="env" />
<property name="build_parameter" value="${env.BUILD_NUMBER}"/>
For Groovy script in the Jenkinsfile using the $BUILD_NUMBER it works.
Use $env:BUILD_NUMBER in PowerShell script

How do i pass parameters from Jenkins to Ant scripts?

For some GUI testing I'm creating a Jenkins task for each GUI module to be tested.
Once created I'm using Ant to build these tests, but I'm not aware of how to actually pass parameters from Jenkins to Ant build file? Basically how do I do variable substitution in Ant?
I'm using the Sahi framework to test GUI components, so the flow goes like this...
Jenkins → Ant build script → Sahi file to execute
Can anyone please take a look at it?
"Using ant -Dname=value lets you define values for properties on the Ant command line." http://ant.apache.org/faq.html#passing-cli-args
To use a jenkins parameter as a variable when you call any use ${variablename}
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Parameterized+Build
Click Advance under configure section of your job in jenkins and use "Properties" section to pass parameter value to Ant script.
e.g
jenkins.param=10
ant.prop=$jenkins.param where jenkins.param is the parameter defined in the jenkins job .
Now in your ant build script ,you can get the value by using ${ant.prop}.
From Jenkins to SAHI Pro via ANT.
In the ant target that you call from Jenkins, give the following within sahi tag.
<customfield key="variable_name" value=" variable _value"/>
Now, such values from Jenkins will be available in SAHI Pro through the ant target. To retrieve them in SAHI, you should set them in “CUSTOM_FIELDS” of testrunner file.
For example:
SET CUSTOM_FIELDS= -variable_name jenkinsToSahiVariable
Where -variable_name should be same key that you set in ant target. And second string will contain the value you set from Jenkins. To get this in a sahi file, use sahiSuite API like following.
$jenkinsValues = _suiteInfo();
$sahiVariable = $ jenkinsValues ["jenkinsToSahiVariable"];

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