Asking Jenkins git plugin to build a specific tag

[Allen Bierbaum]

We have a build that is working fine with git to monitor and build all branches in our repository.

- For Branches to build we use the default of: '**'

- We skip internal tagging and we don't do any merging operations.

To release a version of our product, we tag a git commit on one of our stable branches, then we want to build that specific tag to make the build to deploy.

What we would like to do is setup our normal build to have and additional parameter:  GOLD_BUILD_TAG

So the steps we would like to do for a release build are:

  * Tag a commit using a gold tag. (ex: '2.8.3')

  * Load Jenkins and go to our normal build job, queue a manual build with the value of GOLD_BUILD_TAG set to 2.8.3

  * Have Jenkins checkout the code for that tag and run the normal build scripts

  * The scripts will notice it is a gold build and do the right thing to create a package

The problem is we can't figure out how to do the 3rd step and make Jenkins git plugin checkout the code for the tag.

What are we missing?  Is this possible?  Can we do it using a parameter in a "normal" build?

-Allen

[Sami Tikka]

Check the Parameterized build. Enter a variable name, like VARIABLE. Then specify the "Branches to build" as a $VARIABLE.

You might want to have the default value of the variable be "master" or "*"

You'll have to figure out how your build process tells a gold build apart from a normal build.

I myself don't do that. My build process makes only one kind of artifacts, the ones I could give to the customer when they have passed all tests.

-- Sami

[Allen Bierbaum]

That comes close to working.  But doesn't allow me to keep using auto builds based on polling for all branches.

I setup a test build that used COMMIT_TO_BUILD as a parameter and set it for the "Branches to build".  When I used values like "origin/stable/1.5" it would correctly set the GIT_BRANCH environment variable and checkout the correct branch.  So that part works great. :)

There were several things that didn't work though. I set the default value to "*"  (also tried with "**" and "").

Didn't work:

  1. manually spawn a build to get the latest branch (ie. do what it would do if I wasn't using the variable but instead was using "**" directly).  This sets the GIT_BRANCH value to "*" and seems to fail the checkout.

  2. setting up SCM polling to pickup new changes doesn't work.  It never seems to find that there was a change on a branch that matches.

Do you know any way to get these two items working while still allowing direct setting of the branch/tag/commit to build?

-Allen