Jenkins Jobs

Listing all jobs on a Jenkins server with more information than just their respective names.

• Free software: GNU General Public License v3

Features

• Implements the jenkins_jobs CLI that allows the reporting of jobs in a Jenkins server.

• The reports includes information of job name, job type, job description, if the job is executed through a schedule and the schedule itself.

• Implements the jenkins_exporter CLI that allows the exporting of jobs information to a file in a Shelve format, which allows to export this information and use it locally for development or even with jenkins_jobs CLI.

Rationale

Some time ago I got to migrate jobs from three Jenkins servers with about 800 jobs included among them and the need to migrate those jobs to somewhere else.

I will not discuss the reasons for such humongous amount, but anyway I would need to understand what those jobs were, how they were built and other details, so I could come up with a better strategy of migration.

For my surprise, no tooling was available to use at that time.

Listing with Jenkins CLI

My first attempt was to use the official Jenkins CLI to extract that information.

If you are curious, you can use Vagrant with the following Vagrantfile and download the Vagrant VirtualBox box I created with a sample Jenkins server and some examples jobs over there:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "arfreitas/jenkins-centos7"
  config.vm.box_version = "0.0.1"
  config.vm.network 'forwarded_port', guest: 8080, host: 8080, id: 'jenkins'

  config.vm.provider 'virtualbox' do |vb|
    vb.gui = false
    vb.memory = '2048'
    vb.cpus = '2'
    vb.name = 'jenkins-sample'
end

These are the credentials already setup:

• user: admin

• password: admin

• token: 116f3e55f677416a7c054faa20fbbcf0be

Finally, fire up the VM:

$ vagrant up

After the setup is complete, fire up the commands below:

$ vagrant ssh
$ java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://localhost:8080/ -webSocket -auth admin:116f3e55f677416a7c054faa20fbbcf0be list-jobs
freestyle-sample
pipeline-sample

Not a very exciting output. You will get the job names and that’s it.

Listing with the REST API

So then I tried the Jenkins REST API with the sample.py Python 3 program:

$ cd /vagrant
$ ./sample.py
{'_class': 'hudson.model.FreeStyleProject', 'name': 'freestyle-sample', 'url': 'http://localhost:8080/job/freestyle-sample/', 'color': 'notbuilt', 'fullname': 'freestyle-sample'}
XML information:
OrderedDict([('project',
              OrderedDict([('keepDependencies', 'false'),
                           ('properties', None),
                           ('scm',
                            OrderedDict([('@class', 'hudson.scm.NullSCM')])),
                           ('canRoam', 'false'),
                           ('disabled', 'false'),
                           ('blockBuildWhenDownstreamBuilding', 'false'),
                           ('blockBuildWhenUpstreamBuilding', 'false'),
                           ('triggers', None),
                           ('concurrentBuild', 'false'),
                           ('builders', None),
                           ('publishers', None),
                           ('buildWrappers', None)]))])
{'_class': 'org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.job.WorkflowJob', 'name': 'pipeline-sample', 'url': 'http://localhost:8080/job/pipeline-sample/', 'color': 'notbuilt', 'fullname': 'pipeline-sample'}
XML information:
OrderedDict([('flow-definition',
              OrderedDict([('@plugin', 'workflow-job@2.40'),
                           ('keepDependencies', 'false'),
                           ('properties', None),
                           ('triggers', None),
                           ('disabled', 'false')]))])

If you take in consideration this is almost raw output, it’s an improvement because of the additional details, but far from enough.

First because part of the output is XML. Second, it is not exactly easy to understand the output.

Worst, the XML specification depends on the job underline mechanism: if the job is based on a plugin, the XML format will depend on that plugin, not on Jenkins.

Getting documentation about the XML format is another challenge.

Solution

What the jenkins-jobs project tries to do is to map desired information from the XML format based on the Python classes under jenkins_jobs.jobs module.

References

• The JenkinsAPI project.

• The python-jenkins project.

• Stackoverflow question: Groovy to list all jobs.

• Stackoverflow question: Determining the type of Jenkins project.

Credits

This package was created with Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template.