Jenkins to GoCD Migration?

[Dil BV]

Hi,

We use Jenkins 2.0 (both free style & pipeline jobs) quite extensively in our organization. We're currently investigating other options for CI/CD tooling and GoCD is one of them. However one of the questions that has come up is, are there any migration guides for bringing existing Jenkins jobs into GoCD or would it be an exercise of manually rebuilding our workflows into GoCD? I've had a search around and couldn't find anything, so thought I'd ask the question here.

Thanks!

[Aravind SV]

Hello Dil,

I haven't done that migration but as far as I know, it's going to be manual. Jenkins relies a lot on plugins and the configuration tends to be dependent on them. So, there is no straightforward path, since GoCD doesn't encourage that kind of a dependency on plugins at least for what should be core to the product (built in materials, tasks, artifacts, etc).

This is mentioned in a GoCD blog post (https://www.gocd.org/2017/03/01/importance-and-principles-of-cd-pipelines/). Search for: "Able to run this process locally".

My recommendation, if you're looking to migrate is to not fall into the trap of looking for a plugin for everything. Try and make sure that your configuration is outside of the tool and versioned, as much as possible. That way, you don't tie yourself to any tool and retain the flexibility to be independent. Figure out whether concepts such as custom tabs and pipelines as code (https://github.com/tomzo/gocd-yaml-config-plugin) are relevant in this migration.

Cheers,
Aravind

[Dil BV]

Ok cool, thanks for that, yep that's what we were also thinking, if we rebuilt our pipelines we'd want to move as much logic out and into source controlled configs that become tool independent