Jenkins Project Artifacts and Workspace

Question

I've used jenkins for quite a few years but have never set it up myself which I did at my new job. There are a couple questions and issues that I ran into.

Default workspace location - It seems like the latest Jenkins has the default workspace in Jenkins\jobs[projectName]\workspace and is overwritten (or wiped if selected) for every build. I thought that it should instead be in Jenkins\jobs[projectName]\builds[build_id]\ so that it would be able to store the workspace state for every build for future reference?

Displaying workspace on the project>Build_ID page - This goes along with the previous as I expected each 'workspace' for previous builds to show here. Currently in my setup this individual page gives you nothing except the Git revision and what repo changes triggered the build. As well as console output. Where are the artifacts? Where is the link to this build's workspace that was used?

Archiving Artifacts in builds - When choosing artifacts, the filter doesn't seem to work. My build creates a filestructure with the artifacts in it inside workspace. I want to store this and the artifacts filter says it starts at workspace. So I put in 'artifacts' and nothing gets stores (also where would this get stored?). I have also tried '/artifacts' and 'artifacts/*'.

Any help would be great! Thanks!

Answer 1

It does seem like you are confused about several aspects of Jenkins.. I think your question basically boils down to the following.

What is a difference between a workspace and a build?

So, here are some thoughts on this topic:

1. Builds are historical data. They (usually) don't change like a workspace does during building/checkout.
2. Builds contain information about a run (e.g. its status, build number, change log, etc) and any artifacts that you tell it to archive (logs, test results, etc). They (usually) don't contain source code like a workspace.
3. Builds are stored in the Jenkins\jobs\[projectName]\builds\[build_id]\ directory. This is a directory managed by Jenkins and you (usually) do not need to modify anything in this directory. However, workspaces are directories meant for the build and you can do pretty much anything with them and place them anywhere (it does not need to be in the default Jenkins\jobs\[projectName]\workspace directory.
4. Workspaces should be able to be wiped at any given time. To restore it, just rebuild the job with the same parameters/revision. If you need to keep something after a build, tell Jenkins to archive it before the build is done.
5. In regard to saving the entire state, I don't think you need to do that. As mentioned in #4, you should be able to reproduce the same build by kicking off the same revision/parameters as the build in question. If you cannot get back to the original state from the same revision/parameters, then that might be something to strive for as debugging is going to be a nightmare. :)
6. A workspace is an aspect of the project and not a build and that is why there is no link to the workspace from that page. Again, a build is just saved data from a previous run. A project uses the workspace to build stuff and that is why you can get to the workspace from that page.
7. In regard to how to save artifacts, you must specify the names of the files you want to save. Unless you are trying to save a file called "artifacts", then you should probably use something else. How about **/*.log for all log files? or **/*.xml for all xml files?

Hope this helps.