Strategy for plugin updates

[Sam K]

Hi

  I've been a administering Jenkins for about 2 - 3 years now.  What I've come across several times is that while updates to the Jenkins core go fairly smoothly, the plugins update don't.  After the recent security related mandatory update from 2.40 -> 2.45, while the core behaves fine, a plugins update screwed stuff up.  Fortunately, from my previous experiences, I had made a backup of the plugins folder and was able to get back to where I was without the issues nor the updated plugins.  

  There were some 20 + plugins that needed an update and I chose to update all of them.  I(and others I'm sure) don't have the time or patience to update each one, wait for a week, and declare it a success.  What is the most common strategy to update plugins?  Should I create a scm repo and checkin each time I apply an update so I can go back to the one that was working fine?  Even so, some issues might come up after weeks.  The recent issue I had was garbage messages like 'could not connect to remote host' eventhough everything was working fine.  There was no indication that a certain plugin's update could have caused this. In one scenario, a rolling back of the git plugin solved a issue.  

thanks

[Mark Waite]

The update center provides a facility that allows you to roll back one version of a plugin. 

Since you're likely already aware of that, I assume you want to rollback to a prior state.  The SCM sync configuration plugin https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/SCM+Sync+configuration+plugin allows you to connect a Jenkins instance to a backing source control repository.  I don't personally use it, but it is available in the update center if you'd like to experiment.

I have preferred to create a Docker image of Jenkins which includes the precise plugins (and job configurations) that I use.  Then I can run that Docker image on one of several different machines while I'm testing it.

The official Jenkins Docker image (https://github.com/jenkinsci/docker) includes some instructions for that use model.

I've deviated some from the official Jenkins Docker image because I prefer to keep my plugins stored with the Jenkins image in a github repository with large file support enabled.  If you want to see that variant, you can look at https://github.com/MarkEWaite/docker-lfs .  It requires that you install git large file storage from https://git-lfs.github.com/ .  I've been using that for a week or two for my personal Jenkins environment, and it has felt comfortable and workable.  It also has allowed me to have a regular place where I can learn more about git LFS.

Mark Waite

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