The OpenStack jenkins-job-builder project provides a very useful tool that enables storing Jenkins job configuration as code.

This cookbook installs and configures jenkins-job-builder, as well as providing a build_jenkins_job definition which runs jenkins-job-builder against a given file or directory.

This cookbook depends on the opscode python cookbook for installation of jenkins-job-builder via pip. The jenkins-job-builder software will not be very useful to you without a Jenkins server to talk to.

The following attributes are used for setting directory and file ownership

• jenkins_job_builder.user
• jenkins_job_builder.group

The following attributes are used to generate the config file in '/etc/jenkins_jobs'

• jenkins_job_builder.username
• jenkins_job_builder.password
• jenkins_job_builder.url

Although this cookbook can be used stand-alone to simply install jenkins-job-builder, it is intended for use within an application or wrapper cookbook for automating the configuration of your Jenkins server.

For example, you may create your own examplecorp-jenkins-jobs cookbook with a recipe for the widget project:

include_recipe 'jenkins'
include_recipe 'jenkins_job_builder'

template '/opt/examplecorp-jenkins-jobs/widget.yaml' do
  # derp derp de derp
end

build_jenkins_job 'widget' do
  job_config '/opt/examplecorp-jenkins-jobs/widget.yaml'
end

This would effectively install the jenkins server, install jenkins-job-builder, create a jenkins-job-builder yaml file from template and update the Jenkins server configuration with that yaml file.

The build_jenkins_job definition accepts the following parameters:

• job_config -- path to a file or directory that jenkins-job update should be run against (required)
• config_path -- path to the config file that jenkins-job should be run with (defaults to '/etc/jenkins_jobs/jenkins_jobs.ini')
• delete -- boolean which controls whether or not to delete the named job (defaults to false)

Because jenkins-job-builder maintains its own internal cache representing the state of configured jobs, we depend on the accuracy of that cache for idempotency.

Just as with jenkins-job-builder itself, this cookbook assumes jobs will be managed only via jenkins-job-builder, all changes made via the web will be lost. You may wish to put a message to this effect in your jenkins job descriptions.