How Do I Backup Jenkins Jobs?

2013-05-18 — jenkins, grunt-jenkins — 1 min read

Making changes to a Jenkins instance that has been around for a while can make even the most experienced developers nervous. Jenkins configurations tend to have a number of things in common:

They grow massively over time
Their intent isn't always clear
They are often put together by different people at different times

Assumptions

Your Jenkins server is located at http://localhost:8080
Your Jenkins job is named deploy-prod

Backup Jobs

A reasonable way to deal with this anxiety is to backup the configuration. Fortunately, that's easy with Jenkins. Simply point your browser to http://localhost:8080/job/deploy-prod/config.xml and save the XML (example below) to disk.

1<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
2<project>
3    <actions/>
4    <description>deploys to cloud instance</description>
5    <keepDependencies>false</keepDependencies>
6    <properties/>
7    <scm class="hudson.scm.NullSCM"/>
8    <canRoam>true</canRoam>
9    <disabled>false</disabled>
10    <blockBuildWhenDownstreamBuilding>false</blockBuildWhenDownstreamBuilding>
11    <blockBuildWhenUpstreamBuilding>false</blockBuildWhenUpstreamBuilding>
12    <triggers class="vector"/>
13    <concurrentBuild>false</concurrentBuild>
14    <builders>
15        <hudson.tasks.Shell>
16            <command>echo "deploying to prod"</command>
17        </hudson.tasks.Shell>
18    </builders>
19    <publishers/>
20    <buildWrappers/>
21</project>

Restore Jobs

A backup is only as good as your confidence in restoring it, so it's a good idea to take a few minutes before making any of those big changes and see if you can restore the configuration. I'd suggest changing the description, as it's a low-risk update that is easily visible. To restore your configuration, you'll need a tool like Postman[1], where you can paste the XML contents in the body and POST to http://localhost:8080/job/deploy-prod/config.xml

Automate It

This quickly becomes a repetitive and mundane task that is perfect to automate — which is exactly what I've done for the grunt JavaScript build tool.

After installing grunt-jenkins[2][3] from npm, include it in your grunt.js gruntfile and add the jenkins configuration block:

1grunt.initConfig({

1// all your other config
2
3    jenkins: {
4        serverAddress: 'http://ci.mycompany.com:8080',
5        pipelineDirectory: 'ci' //optional, defaults to 'pipeline'
6    }
7});

Usage is simple:

1grunt jenkins-backup-jobs

This command will contact your Jenkins server, get a list of all the jobs, and save every configuration to pipeline/job-name/config.xml.

To see how restoring works, make a small change to a job's description in the XML and run:

1grunt jenkins-install-jobs

Now check out your change on the Jenkins server. Pipeline configuration instantly has the respect it deserves in your source tree.

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