After Nick Silkey mentioned about the Jenkins Job builder on the Chef-Openstack Foodfight show, or the jjb for short, I started to look around for a how-to on starting from scratch. The typical documentation is out there, but nothing to say, “Hey I want to use the jjb and Jenkins and I have neither.”

This how-to is my steps on getting this build to work. (Granted, I should probably write a wrapper cookbook for this, but that’s a long term project and it shouldn’t be too hard.)

OK, so you have a machine you want to get Jenkins up and running on. First thing first, get Jenkins. I work for Chef, so naturally I gravitate towards using the jenkins-cookbook. There is a lot you can do with it, but the simplest installation is the following.

~ $ git clone https://github.com/chef-cookbooks/jenkins ~ $ chef exec knife cookbook upload jenkins ~ $ chef exec knife bootstrap <machine> -r recipe[jenkins::master]

I should say that the <machine> is a node that you’d like to check in to your chef server and adds the jenkins::master recipe to the run_list and converges.

You after this completes you should be able to go to: http://<machine>:8080 and see a new Jenkins build.

Ok, 1/2 way there.

Now, you have a couple ways to do this, I suggest starting on the box that has Jenkins built, so you take out a possible variable. NOTE: There is no reason though you can’t run the following commands on your local machine and do it all remotely. I should also mention that I built the following on Ubuntu 14.04.

First you need to checkout the jjb .

~ $ git clone https://github.com/openstack-infra/jenkins-job-builder.git ~ $ cd jenkins-job-builder

The base install of Ubuntu 14.04 is pretty sparse, so you need add some pip’s for python so jjb can compile correctly.

~/jenkins-job-builder $ sudo apt-get install python-pip ~/jenkins-job-builder $ sudo pip install pyyaml ~/jenkins-job-builder $ sudo pip install pbr ~/jenkins-job-builder $ sudo pip install python-jenkins ~/jenkins-job-builder $ sudo pip install setuptools ~/jenkins-job-builder $ sudo pip install ordereddict

After you have these things installed, you can run the following to build the jjb .

~/jenkins-job-builder $ sudo python setup.py install

Now you should be able to run the following to test out your build of the jjb .

~/jenkins-job-builder $ jenkins-jobs test tests/yamlparser/fixtures/templates002.yaml INFO:root:Will use anonymous access to Jenkins if needed. INFO:jenkins_jobs.builder:Number of jobs generated: 2 INFO:jenkins_jobs.builder:Job name: project-name-26 <?xml version = "1.0" encoding = "utf-8" ?> <project> <actions/> <description>< ; ! -- Managed by Jenkins Job Builder -- > ; </description> <keepDependencies>false</keepDependencies> <blockBuildWhenDownstreamBuilding>false</blockBuildWhenDownstreamBuilding> <blockBuildWhenUpstreamBuilding>false</blockBuildWhenUpstreamBuilding> <concurrentBuild>false</concurrentBuild> <canRoam>true</canRoam> <properties/> <scm class = "hudson.scm.NullSCM" /> <builders> <hudson.tasks.Shell> < command > git co old_branch</command> </hudson.tasks.Shell> </builders> <publishers/> <buildWrappers/> </project> INFO:jenkins_jobs.builder:Job name: project-name-27 <?xml version = "1.0" encoding = "utf-8" ?> <project> <actions/> <description>< ; ! -- Managed by Jenkins Job Builder -- > ; </description> <keepDependencies>false</keepDependencies> <blockBuildWhenDownstreamBuilding>false</blockBuildWhenDownstreamBuilding> <blockBuildWhenUpstreamBuilding>false</blockBuildWhenUpstreamBuilding> <concurrentBuild>false</concurrentBuild> <canRoam>true</canRoam> <properties/> <scm class = "hudson.scm.NullSCM" /> <builders> <hudson.tasks.Shell> < command > git co new_branch</command> </hudson.tasks.Shell> </builders> <publishers/> <buildWrappers/> </project> INFO:jenkins_jobs.builder:Cache saved

I ran into this problem, so here’s a heads up. If you do sudo pip install jenkins which seems logical, you’ll see this when attempting to run jjb .

~/jenkins-job-builder $ jenkins-jobs test tests/yamlparser/fixtures/templates002.yaml Traceback ( most recent call last ) : File "/usr/local/bin/jenkins-jobs" , line 6, in <module> from jenkins_jobs.cmd import main File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/jenkins_jobs/cmd.py" , line 27, in <module> from jenkins_jobs.builder import Builder File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/jenkins_jobs/builder.py" , line 25, in <module> import jenkins File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/jenkins.py" , line 9, in <module> lookup3 = cdll.LoadLibrary ( os.path.join ( get_python_lib () , "lookup3.so" )) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ctypes/__init__.py" , line 443, in LoadLibrary return self._dlltype ( name ) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ctypes/__init__.py" , line 365, in __init__ self._handle = _dlopen ( self._name, mode ) OSError: /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/lookup3.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Now you need to add a user, I suggest the jenkins with the password of jenkins . You can do this either by the data_bag if you want, or if you’re lazy like me you can use the GUI. After you create the user, take note of the API key, you’ll need to know it for the next step.

After this, you need to create a etc/jenkins_jobs.ini file, here’s a very basic one:

[job_builder] ignore_cache=True keep_descriptions=False include_path=.:scripts:~/git/ recursive=False exclude=.*:manual:./development allow_duplicates=False [jenkins] user=jenkins password=0b7326314fca6256a25513c3d0f0e13f # this is the API key of the user above url=http://127.0.0.1:8080 query_plugins_info=False ##### This is deprecated, use job_builder section instead #ignore_cache=True

Now you should be able to:

~/jenkins-jobs-builder $ jenkins-jobs --conf etc/jenkins_jobs.ini update tests/yamlparser/fixtures/templates002.yaml

And you should have two jobs on your Jenkins server.

Congrats, now you have a jenkins+ jjb build. I suggest you should create another directory, call it jobs/ or something like it, do a git init in it. You may want to move the jenkins_jobs.ini to that directory, and create a simple yaml and commit them. The following is an example of a simple yaml .

- job : name : Basic example project-type : freestyle description : ' A basic example of a `jjb` job that echos "Hello world and cats out /etc/password"' builders : - shell : | echo 'Hello world!' cat /etc/passwd

Now you can either, create a file per job, or have everything under one file. It depends on how you think you’ll grow your jobs.

Then now you can run the following whenever you need to update your jobs:

~/jobs $ jenkins-jobs --conf jenkins_jobs.ini update ./

Oh! Those demo jobs don’t do anything and honestly, are ugly. If you want to delete them, you can run the following: