This Ansible role provides an automated way to install Jenkins on Linux and manage its configuration so it is possible to easily rebuild it automatically. This role will install the Jenkins package, then use the APIs to install the required plugins. It will also create the jenkins user accounts. Finally it creates a special job, the jenkins-dsl job which will create or update all other jenkins jobs.

At this stage this role supports the basic installation. More work will be required to manage things such as the configuration of the slaves and additional plugins. This role has been tested with Jenkins 2.32.

The jenkins dsl plugin allows you to write groovy code which will generate Jobs in jenkins programatically. This ansible role creates a special job which will create the other jobs from the groovy code using the plugin when it is executed: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Job+DSL+Plugin If you want this role to prepare this Jenkins-DSL job then you must keep all your groovy files in the same repository as your ansible files but the files can be in a directory outside of this role so they can be managed separately. The files should all be stored in the same directory and have a ".groovy.j2" extension. Then you must provide the path to this directory using the following parameter: jenkins_dsl_source_files. You can use a path relative to this role using a value such as '{{ role_path }}/../../my-role/templates/my-dsl-files' This ansible role will first use the ansible template module to copy these files to the disk on the jenkins server so you can use jinja templates to parameterize these groovy files using ansible variables. You can see how the dummy parameter named "jenkins_dsl_dummy_variable" is used in the template for the dummy job. Once the DSL files have been created from the templates on the jenkins server the Jenkins-DSL job will point to this directory on the local disk. With this approach you can have all your ansible and jenkins configured stored in a single git repository. Also you can use ansible parameters in the groovy code which creates your jenkins jobs. Hence everything can be centralized in a single place and you can avoid lot of duplicate variables between your ansible code and your jenkins job configuration.

First this role add support for a yum or apt repository which provides packages for the LTS version of Jenkins. Then it installs the package. It creates XML configurations for each jenkins user account listed in the parameters. One of these account must be a special account to be used by Ansible so it can access the Jenkins APIs via HTTP as this is required to install plugins automatically and to create the initial DSL job.

• Install this role using ansible-galaxy https://galaxy.ansible.com/fdupoux/jenkins/
• Make sure all parameters listed in the defaults/main.yml file of this role are defined properly. You can override definitions for these parameters using the ansible group_vars or host_vars if necessary so it matches your requirements.
• If you want to use the jenkins-dsl plugin to manage the configuration of your jenkins jobs then you must store the groovy code in a git repository and you must pass the details to this role.
• Apply this role in one of your playbooks

This role has been tested on CentOS 7 and it effort has been made to make it work on Debian based distributions. But this role has not been tested on Debian or Ubuntu at this stage.