Schedule specific build target in Jenkins?

Question

The group that I work in has standardized on Jenkins for Continuous Integration builds. Code check-in triggers a standard build, Cobertura analysis and publish to an Artifactory SNAPSHOT repo. I've just finished adding a new target to the master build file that'll kick off a Sonar run but I don't want that running on every check-in.

Is there a way to schedule a nightly build of a specific build target in Jenkins? Jenkins obviously facilitates scheduled builds but it'll run the project's regular build every time. I'd like to be able to schedule the Sonar build target to run nightly.

I could, of course, create a separate Jenkins project just to run the Sonar target on a schedule but I'm trying to avoid that if I can. Our Jenkins server already has several hundred builds on it; doubling that for the sake of scheduling nightly builds isn't very desirable. I looked for a Jenkins plug-in that might facilitate this but I couldn't find anything. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Here's one way to do it, if you are ok with triggering the build using cron or some other scheduling tool:

• Make the build parameterized, and use a parameter in your build file to decide if the Sonar build target should run or not.
• Trigger the build remotely by HTTP POST:ing the parameter values as a form to http://[jenkins-host]/jobs/[jobname]/buildWithParameters. Depending on your Jenkins version and configuration, you might need to add an Authentication Token and include this in your url.

• Authenticate your POST using a username and password.

  wget --auth-no-challenge --http-user=USERNAME --http-password=PASSWORD "https://[jenkins-host]/job/[jobname]/buildWithParameters?token=<token defined in job configuration>&<param>=<value>&<param2>=<value2>"

Answer 2

I am also looking for a solution for this. My current solution in my mind is to create 2 triggers in the regular build, one is the nightly build, another one is Polling SCM

In the sonar plugin configuration, it has the options to skip the builds triggered by the SCM change. Therefore, only the nightly build will start a sonar analysis.

I didn't get a chance to test it now, but I suppose this will work.

Updated on 12/19/2011 The above solution doesn't work if the sonar analysis is invoked as a standalone build step. To make the sonar analysis run conditionally, you could use the following 2 plugins:

1. Conditional BuildStep Plugin - this allows the sonar analysis to be run conditionally
2. Jenkins Environment Injector Plug-in - this allows you to inject the variables to indicate how the build is triggered.