Scheduled Safe Restart

[AndyB]

Hi,

Could you tell me if it's possible to schedule a regular safe-restart of Jenkins? I have the safe-restart plugin which works fine, but I'd like to have Jenkins do a safe-restart over the weekend when it's generally idle. I looked at the command line interface but I can't use that as it requires either storing a password in a file or passing a password on the command line, neither of which is doable in our environment. Is there a way to schedule an automatic safe restart from within Jenkins? I guess the problem is that if it's a job the restart will block 'til the job itself is completed, causing a deadlock. Can anyone suggest a way to achieve this?

Thanks,

Andy

[Daniel Beck]

You can also use an SSH key for authentication with jenkins-cli.jar (configure the key in the Jenkins user configuration), so if "environment" refers to non-technical reasons, that would be an option.

Then there's the REST API. POST to /safeRestart to perform that action. For authentication, use the API key of the user account in Jenkins instead of a password.

If you use the Groovy plugin, you could create a job that performs safeRestart in a System Groovy build step with 'jenkins.model.Jenkins.instance.safeRestart()'. Schedule as you would any other job.

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[Baptiste Mathus]

Just out of curiosity, why do you want to automate that restart?

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[AndyB]

Hi Daniel,

Yes 'environment' refers to policies. Saving a key should be acceptable. I'll give that a go, thanks.  Re. creating a job to do this, I'll try that, but I suspect that the safe-restart waits for no jobs to be running (that's the whole point of it after all), so issuing from a job might not work.

Thanks

Andy

[AndyB]

Hi Baptiste.

>Just out of curiosity, why do you want to automate that restart?

I find Jenkins slows down after running for awhile (a week or so) and a restart usually fixes this. I've used the monitoring plugin to try to identify issues but I haven't spotted anything other than response times slowly increasing over time. Forcing garbage collection etc., seem to help a little, but so far the best solution is simply to restart. If I can schedule that over the weekend that should work well.  But yes, you are correct to ask why I need to do this as it shouldn't really be required. I'll continue to try and track down the root cause, but in the meantime this should help.

Thanks

Andy

[Daniel Beck]

The job starts before it issues the safe restart command (obviously), then it finishes, then Jenkins restarts. I've tested this before posting.

[AndyB]

>The job starts before it issues the safe restart command (obviously), then it finishes, then Jenkins restarts. I've tested this before posting. 

Sounds perfect, thanks for checking!

Andy

[Christian Willman]

Precisely what we do. Every morning we run a scheduled job to grab and install our master list of Jenkins plugins and then trigger a safeRestart via a System Groovy build step. Works like a charm and hasn't failed us in over six months.

One thing to watch out for: if your developers have a rogue job, perhaps one with a broken, never-ending test, then you might come in Monday morning to a Jenkins instance still stuck in quiet mode with a full build queue. The queue will persist a restart but it's not good, especially if other teams are relying on Jenkins to deploy to regions or perform critical tests over the weekend. If a team is guilty of preventing a restart then we move their job(s) to a purgatory until they fix the problem. You could also use the build timeout plugin I guess.