Jenkins command line - running build job

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Chris Chartier

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Sep 2, 2015, 1:02:43 PM9/2/15

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Please forgive is this is something obvious. I'm pretty new to jenkins.

First relevant configuration info:
Jenkins 1.608
Java 1.6.0_39 (but 1.7 and 1.8 are installed if needed)

Here's the scenario. We have a list of jobs that build software projects. These are 'golden' (production) and we don't want to take a chance on playing with these live until tested first. These jobs call pre/post build scripts from a hard coded directory.

We'd like to let people working with the builds to make changes without changing anything in that "golden" architecture (pre/post build scripts or the job's config.xml).

Additionally, we have a good amount of jobs in jenkins and don't want to add 'test' versions for every job that is in there as it would be visually cumbersome.

What I'd like to do:
Run a one-off job that doesn't have an entry in the jenkins UI and get output all from command line. One that we'd have a config.xml for as a copy of the one on the system with maybe tweaks if needed. I was hoping something like "build <testjobname> <config.xml>" where the user can tweak the config.xml to point to a test directory for the pre/post build scripts (parts that change most).

Any suggestions? Is this possible and I'm missing it or do we "have" to have a test entry in the jenkins UI as a container?

Victor Martinez

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Sep 2, 2015, 6:07:17 PM9/2/15

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Hi,

I'm not sure if I understood your requirements, but since you need to update some config.xml on demand, rather than using config.xml and inject that via command line, what do you think of using Configuration as Code paradigm?

There are a bunch of different plugins/tools based on the above paradigm:

JobDSL (https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Job+DSL+Plugin)
JobBuilder (http://docs.openstack.org/infra/jenkins-job-builder/)
Jenkins Workflow (https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Workflow+Plugin)

Then you can have your entire jenkins job configuration within your SCM and allow people to change it easily via the above plugins since they are based on Groovy and Python.