Adding Jenkins Pipelines on Build

Question

does anyone know if its possible to add a Jenkins pipeline build into a Jenkins docker image? For example, I may have a Jenkinsfile that defines my pipeline in groovie, and would like to ADD that into my image when building from the Jenkins image.

something like:

FROM jenkins:latest

ADD ./jobs/Jenkinsfile-pipeline-example $JENKINS_HOME/${someplace}

And have that pipeline ready to go when i run it.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It's a lot cleaner to use Jenkinsfile for this instead. This way, as your repositories develop you can change the build process without needing to recompile and redeploy your Jenkins instance everytime. (less work, and less CI downtime) Also, having the Jenkinsfile in source code allows a simpler decoupling.

If you have any questions about extending Jenkins on Docker further to handle building NodeJS, Ruby or something else I go into how to do all that in an article.

Answer 2

You can create any job in Jenkins by passing in an XML file that describes the job. See https://support.cloudbees.com/hc/en-us/articles/220857567-How-to-create-a-job-using-the-REST-API-and-cURL

The way I've done this is to manually create the job I want in Jenkins, then append config.xml to the URL and it shows you the XML content needed to generate the pipeline job. Save that XML and you can deliver it to your newly deployed Jenkins instance.

I use a system similar to this to generate several hundred jobs based on our external build specifications.