Jenkins Wargemmer

What?

The jenkins wargemmer consists of two parts: a Rake task for turning a jenkins war file (__W.__eb A. __R.__chive for those not familiar with java lingo) into a distributable rubygem, and a cron task for creating a new version of the gem, whenever a new jenkins version comes out.

The script polls the jenkins update center and checks to see if there is a newer version of the jenkins distribution that has not yet been gemmed up and if not, then bundles it and pushes it to rubygems.org as a gem named jenkins-war.

The generated gem has the same version number as the jenkins distribution itself. So if you want the 1.386 distribution, then you would do a

gem install jenkins-war --version 1.386

How?

In addition to the war file long with the The jenkins-war gem comes with an executable script jenkins.war to help you leverage your jenkins distribution.

Without any arguments, it returns the location of the jenkins warfile itself:

$ jenkins.war location
/Users/cowboyd/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p174@jenkins.war/gems/jenkins-war-1.391/lib/jenkins/jenkins.war

It can unpack itself to a given directory. This is useful if you want to extract certain assets such as classfiles, annotations, configurations from it.

$ jenkins.war unpack /tmp/jenkins.war.exploded

It can copy itself anywhere

$ jenkins.war cp tmp
copied /Users/cowboyd/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p174@jenkins.war/gems/jenkins-war-1.391/lib/jenkins/jenkins.war -> tmp

Or if you want the classpath:

$ jenkins.war classpath
/Users/cowboyd/.jenkins/wars/1.391/WEB-INF/lib/jenkins-core-1.391.jar

You can even run a test server with your shiny jenkins war file.

$ jenkins.war server

All of these functions can be accessed from ruby code via the Jenkins::War module.