preface

The Jenkins migration project I encountered was not easily solved by simply copying physical files. There were thousands of different projects that needed to be separated by jobs. Jenkins Restrict node, which classifies Jobs and other factors of different projects according to view. A lot of research and practice have been done on Jenkins migration this time, and I hope the methods summarized can be helpful to you.

Summary of the Jenkins Export and Import Jobs migration export import task practice

Update history

January 06, 2020 – First draft

Read the original – https://wsgzao.github.io/post…

Further reading

Jenkins Plugins Index

export and import jobs in Jenkins

Is it possible to exchange jobs between 2 different Jenkins’? I’m searching for a way to export/import jobs.

Solutions/Answers:

Solution 1:

Jenkins has a rather good wiki, albeit hard to read when you’re new to CI software…

They offer a simple solution for moving jobs between servers

The trick probably was the need to reload config from the Jenkins Configuration Page.

Solution 2:

Probably use jenkins command line is another option, see https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Jenkins+CLI

  • create-job: Creates a new job by reading stdin as a configuration XML file.
  • get-job: Dumps the job definition XML to stdout

So you can do

java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://server get-job myjob > myjob.xml
java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://server create-job newmyjob < myjob.xml

It works fine for me and I am used to store in inside my version control system

Solution 3:

A one-liner:

$ curl -s http://OLD_JENKINS/job/JOBNAME/config.xml | curl -X POST 'http://NEW_JENKINS/createItem? name=JOBNAME' --header "Content-Type: application/xml" -d @-

With authentication:

$ curl -s http:///<USER>:<API_TOKEN>@OLD_JENKINS/job/JOBNAME/config.xml | curl -X POST 'http:///<USER>:<API_TOKEN>@NEW_JENKINS/createItem? name=JOBNAME' --header "Content-Type: application/xml" -d @-

With Crumb, if CSRF is active (see details here):

Get crumb with:

$ CRUMB_OLD=$(curl -s 'http://<USER>:<API_TOKEN>@OLD_JENKINS/crumbIssuer/api/xml? xpath=concat(//crumbRequestField,":",//crumb)') $ CRUMB_NEW=$(curl -s 'http://<USER>:<API_TOKEN>@NEW_JENKINS/crumbIssuer/api/xml? xpath=concat(//crumbRequestField,":",//crumb)')

Apply crumb with -H CRUMB:

$ curl -s -H $CRUMB_OLD http:///<USER>:<API_TOKEN>@OLD_JENKINS/job/JOBNAME/config.xml | curl -X POST -H $CRUMB_NEW 'http:///<USER>:<API_TOKEN>@NEW_JENKINS/createItem? name=JOBNAME' --header "Content-Type: application/xml" -d @-

Solution 4:

There’s a plugin called Job Import Plugin that may be what you are looking for. I have used it. It does have issues with importing projects from a server that doesn’t allow anonymous access.

For Completeness:

If you have command line access to both, you can do the procedure already mentioned by Khez for Moving, Copying and Renaming Jenkins Jobs.

Solution 5:

Go to your Jenkins Server’s Front Page, click on the REST API at the bottom of the page:

Create Job

To create a new job, post config.xml to this URL with query parameter name=JOBNAME. You need to send a Content-Type: application/xml header. You’ll get 200 status code if the creation is successful, or 4xx/5xx code if it fails. config.xml is the format Jenkins uses to store the project in the file system, so you can see examples of them in the Jenkins home directory, or by retrieving the XML configuration of existing jobs from /job/JOBNAME/config.xml.

Solution 6:

In my Jenkins instance (version 1.548) the configuration file is at:

/var/lib/jenkins/jobs/-the-project-name-/config.xml

Owned by Jenkins user and Jenkins group with 644 permissions. Coping the file to and from here should work. I haven’t tried changing it directly but have backed-up the config from this spot in case the project needs to be setup again.

Solution 7:

Job Import plugin is the easy way here to import jobs from another Jenkins instance. Just need to provide the URL of the source Jenkins instance. The Remote Jenkins URL can take any of the following types of URLs:

  • http://$JENKINS— Get all jobs on remote instance
  • http://$JENKINS/job/$JOBNAMEGet a single job
  • http://$JENKINS/view/$VIEWNAME— Get all jobs in a particular view

Solution 8:

Thanks to Larry Cai’s answer I managed to create a script to backup all my Jenkins jobs. I created a job that runs this every week. In case someone finds it useful, here it is:

#! /bin/bash #IFS for jobs with spaces. SAVEIFS=$IFS IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b") for i in $(java -jar /run/jenkins/war/WEB-INF/jenkins-cli.jar -s http://server:8080/ list-jobs); do java -jar /run/jenkins/war/WEB-INF/jenkins-cli.jar -s http://server:8080/ get-job ${i} > ${i}.xml; done IFS=$SAVEIFS mkdir deploy tar cvfj "jenkins-jobs.tar.bz2" ./*.xml

Solution 9:

Jenkins export jobs to a directory

 #! /bin/bash
    SAVEIFS=$IFS
    IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
    declare -i j=0
    for i in $(java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://server:8080/jenkins list-jobs  --username **** --password ***);
    do
    let "j++";
    echo $j;
    if [ $j -gt 283 ] // If you have more jobs do it in chunks as it will terminate in the middle of the process. So Resume your job from where it ends.
     then
    java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://lxvbmcbma:8080/jenkins get-job --username **** --password **** ${i} > ${i}.xml;
    echo "done";
    fi
    done

Import jobs

for f in *.xml; do echo "Processing ${f%.*} file.." ; //truncate the .xml extention and load the xml file for job creation java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://server:8080/jenkins create-job ${f%.*} < $f done

Solution 10:

Simple php script worked for me.

Export:

// add all job codes in the array $jobs = array("job1", "job2", "job3"); foreach ($jobs as $value) { fwrite(STDOUT, $value. " \n") or die("Unable to open file!" ); $path = "http://server1:8080/jenkins/job/".$value."/config.xml"; $myfile = fopen($value.".xml", "w"); fwrite($myfile, file_get_contents($path)); fclose($myfile); }

Import:

<? php // add all job codes in the array $jobs = array("job1", "job2", "job3"); foreach ($arr as $value) { fwrite(STDOUT, $value. " \n") or die("Unable to open file!" ); $cmd = "java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://server2:8080/jenkins/ create-job ".$value." < ".$value.".xml"; echo exec($cmd); }

Solution 11:

This does not work for existing jobs, however there is Jenkins job builder.

This allows one to keep job definitions in yaml files and in a git repo which is very portable.

Solution 12:

For those of us in the Windows world who may or may not have Bash available, here’s my PowerShell port of Katu and Larry Cai‘s approach. Hope it helps someone.

##### Config vars ##### $serverUri = 'http://localhost:8080/' # URI of your Jenkins server $jenkinsCli = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins\war\WEB-INF\jenkins-cli.jar' # Path to jenkins-cli.jar on your machine $destFolder = 'C:\Jenkins Backup\' # Output folder (will be created if it doesn't exist) $destFile = 'jenkins-jobs.zip' # Output filename (will be  overwritten if it exists) ######################## $work = Join-Path ([System.IO.Path]::GetTempPath()) ([System.IO.Path]::GetRandomFileName()) New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path $work | Out-Null # Suppress output noise echo "Created a temp working folder: $work" $jobs = (java -jar $jenkinsCli -s $serverUri list-jobs) echo "Found $($jobs.Length) existing jobs: [$jobs]" foreach ($j in $jobs) { $outfile = Join-Path $work "$j.xml" java -jar $jenkinsCli -s $serverUri get-job $j | Out-File $outfile } echo "Saved $($jobs.Length) jobs to temp XML files" New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path $destFolder | Out-Null # Suppress output noise echo "Found (or created) $destFolder folder" $destPath = Join-Path $destFolder $destFile Get-ChildItem $work -Filter *.xml | Write-Zip -Level 9 -OutputPath $destPath -FlattenPaths | Out-Null # Suppress output noise echo "Copied $($jobs.Length) jobs to $destPath" Remove-Item $work -Recurse -Force echo "Removed temp working folder"

Solution 13:

It is very easy just download plugin name

Job Import Plugin

Enter the URL of your Remote Jenkins server and it will import the jobs automatically

Solution 14:

The most easy way, with direct access to the machine is to copy the job folder from first jenkins to another one (you can exclude Workspaces — workspace folder), because the whole job configuration is stored in the XML file on the disk.

Then in the new jenkins just reload configuration in the global settings (admin access is required) should be enough, if not, then you will need to restart Jenkins tool.

Another way can be to use plugins mentioned above this post.

Edit: — In case you can probably also exclude modules folders

Summary of Jenkins migration scheme

The 14 approaches listed above are the most common, but most are extensions based on Scenario 4

The program enumerated above has been very complete basically, is the feeling a bit giddy? In fact, there are mainly the following four kinds of summary

  1. Official Moving/copying/renaming jobs, known as physical document transfer, is not recommended if the situation is complex
  2. Based on Jenkins CLI, this solution relies on Jenkins-CLI. jar to include Java and has some limitations and is not recommended
  3. Based on the form of Job Import Plugin, this kind of scheme has poor universality and is not recommended
  4. Based on the Jenkins REST API, the core is capture<jenkinshost>/job/<jobname>/config.xml, the best effect

REST API

Many objects of Jenkins provide the remote access API. They are available at /… /api/ where “…” portion is the object for which you’d like to access.

XML API

Access data exposed in HTML as XML for machine consumption. Schema is also available. You can also specify optional XPath to control the fragment you’d like to obtain (but see below). For example, .. /api/xml? xpath=//[0].

For XPath that matches multiple nodes, you need to also specify the “wrapper” query parameter to specify the name of the root XML element to be create so that the resulting XML becomes well-formed.

Similarly exclude query parameter can be used to exclude nodes that match the given XPath from the result. This is useful for trimming down the amount of data you fetch (but again see below). This query parameter can be specified multiple times.

XPath filtering is powerful, and you can have it only return a very small data, but note that the server still has to build a full DOM of the raw data, which could cause a large memory spike. To avoid overloading the server, consider using the tree parameter, or use the xpath parameter in conjunction with the tree parameter. When used together, the result of the tree parameter filtering is built into DOM, then the XPath is applied to compute the final return value. In this way, you can often substantially reduce the size of DOM built in memory.

JSON API

Access the same data as JSON for JavaScript-based access. tree may be used.

Python API

Access the same data as Python for Python clients. This can be parsed into Python object as eval(urllib.urlopen(“…” ).read()) and the resulting object tree is identical to that of JSON. However, when you do this, beware of the security implication. If you are connecting to a non-trusted Jenkins, the server can send you malicious Python programs.

In Python 2.6 or later you can safely parse this output using ast.literal_eval(urllib.urlopen(“…”) ).read())

For more information about remote API in Jenkins, see the documentation.

https://jenkins.io/redirect/r…

Use cURL and the Jenkins REST API

Turning off CSRF protection is recommended using the Jenkins REST API 

# To retrieve the job config.xml curl -X GET '<jenkinshost>/job/<jobname>/config.xml' -u username:API_TOKEN -o <jobname>.xml # to use this config to create a new job curl -s -XPOST '<jenkinshost>/createItem? name=<jobname>' -u username:API_TOKEN --data-binary @<jobname>.xml -H "Content-Type:text/xml" # get all jenkins jobs curl -X GET '<jenkinshost>/api/json? pretty=true' -u username:API_TOKEN -o jobs.json # get jenkins view curl -X GET '<jenkinshost>/view/<viewname>/api/json' -u username:API_TOKEN -o view.json

Obviously, replace:

  • username API_TOKEN with your username and password/API_Token
  • jenkinshost with your Jenkins URL
  • jobname with the name of the job that you created via the UI

JSON to CSV Converter

mkdir config_xml vim jobs.txt vim jenkins_jobs_migration.sh #/bin/bash source_jenkins_host="xxx" source_jenkins_username="xxx" source_jenkins_password="xxx" target_jenkins_host="xxx" target_jenkins_username="xxx" target_jenkins_password="xxx" pull() { for line in `cat jobs.txt` do echo ${line} curl -X GET ${source_jenkins_host}job/${line}/config.xml -u ${source_jenkins_username}:${source_jenkins_password} -o config_xml/${line}.xml done } push() { for line in `cat jobs.txt` do echo $line curl -s -XPOST ${target_jenkins_host}createItem? name=${line} -u ${target_jenkins_username}:${target_jenkins_password} --data-binary @config_xml/${line}.xml -H "Content-Type:text/xml" done } case "$1" in push) push ;; pull) pull ;; *) echo "Usage: $NAME {pull|push}" exit 1 ;; esac

Write the core logic of api_jenkins.py in Python

It’s not convenient to make public at the moment

  1. Support for reading context.json configuration files using pipeline.j2 template to automatically generate different types of pipeline. XML import files
  2. Support exporting job config.xml configuration information by view or job export
  3. Support to import job config.xml configuration information by view or job import

Jenkins Backup

archive jenkins setting and plugins

As you probably know, Jenkins currently has only two options for backup plugins:

  • Backup
  • Periodic Backup

Technically you should only choose to periodbackup, but if you’re doing Periodic backups you’re going to have to write Bash scripts

jenkins-backup-script

Refer to the article

Export/import jobs in Jenkins

Moving/copying/renaming jobs

Jenkins CLI

How to create a job using the REST API and cURL?

Jenkins Remote access API