Jenkins Job disappeared after restart

Question

I have this strange problem in Jenkins 1.5.31 .

I had configured Maven jobs which I still see in Jenkins_Home directory. My Jenkins Windows service was not getting started even though I could still access the Jenkins on default port 8080. When I found in event viewer found that service is trying for 8080 which it found to be in use, so I did taskkilPID using the 8080 port process and it successfully restarted the Windows Jenkins service.

However, when I opened the Jenkins URL, I saw only two of my jobs were there and rest disappeared.

Has any one faced this issue?

I checked plugins and found that Maven project plugin installed is 1.5.3.1 and 2.1 is available but it has message -Warning: This plugin is built for Jenkins 1.538 or newer. It may or may not work in your Jenkins.

I don't see those jobs in config.xml and nor in its old copy backup.

Answer 1

After Jenkins restarts, there is the case when some jobs are missing if the syntax in their config.xml contains errors.

1. Check Jenkins logs for errors (Manage Jenkins/System Log)
2. Fix the errors in config.xml of each job. ( path: JENKINS_HOME/jobs//config.xml)
3. Restart jenkins or choose option reload configurations from disk (Manage Jenkins/Reload Configuration from Disk).

When all errors are fixed the job should appear. You can validate your configurations against some online tool, f.e.: https://www.xmlvalidation.com/

Another case is when all Jenkins jobs are missing and an empty dashboard is loaded. This indicates that Jenkins home directory is wrong, so make sure to specify JENKINS_HOME correctly and restart Jenkins.

Answer 2

This happened to me too after a restart. But it was not because of errors in the config.xml, but because another containing folder with the same name but in different case existed on the server.

I don't know how this happened, but after copying over the jobs from the second folder and reloading the folder the job came back up again.

For e.g: the job that went missing was FOLDER-NAME/jobs/job-name

On the Jenkins server, on disk, there was both

FOLDER-NAME/jobs/job-name

folder-name/jobs/job-name

After copying the folder FOLDER-NAME/jobs/job-name to folder-name/jobs/ and reloading the folder (https://<jenkins-host>/jobs/FOLDER-NAME/reload) the job came back up.