Jenkins/Hudson - Run script on all slaves

Question

I have a requirement to run a script on all available slave machines. Primarily this is so they get relevant windows hotfixes and new 3rd party tools before building.

The script I have can be run multiple times without undesirable side effects & is quite light weight, so I'm happy for this to be brute force if necessary.

Can anybody give suggestions as to how to ensure that a slave is 'up-to-date' before it works on a job?

I'm happy with solutions that are driven by a job on the master, or ones which can inject the task (automatically) before normal slave job processing.

Answer 1

My shop does this as part of the slave launch process. We have the slaves configured to launch via execution of a command on the master; this command runs a shell script that rsync's the latest tool files to the slave and then launches the slave process. When there is a tool update, all we need to do is to restart the slaves or the master.

However - we use Linux whereas it looks like you are on Windows, so I'm not sure what the equivalent solution would be for you.

Answer 2

To your title: either use Parameter Plugin or use matrix configuration and list your nodes in it.

To your question about ensuring a slave is reliable, we mark it with a 'testbox' label and try out a variety of jobs on it. You could also have a job that is deployed to all of them and have the job take the machine offline it fails, I imagine.

Using Windows for slaves is very obnoxious for us too :(