What's the best way to bulk update Jenkins projects?

Question

We have hundreds of Jenkins projects (mostly created from a few templates), often need to make the same change to all of them. e.g. today I need to add a post-build step to delete workspace at the end. Next I need to change the step to copy build result to a shared drive to Nexus repository.

What's the best way to apply such kind of bulk change to Jenkins projects?

Answer 1

You could use Configuration Slicing Plugin which is designed to do this.

It supports many configuration options.

Answer 2

Groovy is by far the best way to bulk update jobs. You may have to do a little digging into the jenkins / plugin api to figure out what api calls to make, but the script console (http://yourJenkinsUrl/script) provides an easy way to play around with the code until you get it right.

To get you started, you can add / remove post-build steps by calling the getPublishersList() method on a job and then calling the add / remove methods.

def publishersList = Jenkins.instance.getJob("JobName").getPublishersList()
publishersList.removeAll { it.class == whatever.plugin.class }
publishersList.add(new PluginConstructor())

If you're not sure what publisher class you need to delete the workspace, I would suggest manually adding the desired configurations to one job, and then run getPublishersList() from the script console on that job. You will see the class you are working with in the list, and then you can go look at the api to see what is required to construct it.

You can then iterate through all your jobs and add the publisher doing something like this:

Jenkins.instance.getView("All Jobs").items.each { job ->
    //Maybe some logic here to filter out specific jobs

    job.getPublishersList().add(new PluginConstructor())
}

Alternatively, you can use the Jenkins CLI api or the REST api, but in order to update post-build actions, you will have to modify the project configuration xml file (which isn't trivial programmatically configure) and then overwrite the job configuration with the new configuration file.