CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jenkins
Siva
Siva

Reputation: 21

Jenkins: Best practices for backing up Jenkins home and archiving artifacts

I have started using Jenkins for continuous integration. The requirement is that the build environment including the history of earlier builds with the coverage and test results should be restored, in case the Jenkins fail occasionally when running for a few years. Also the back up is expected to happen automatically. I could understand the functionalities of backup, thinBackup and periodicBackup plugins. As I am new to Jenkins, I wanted to know as

  1. What kind of crashes is expected in Jenkins ?
  2. In case of failure, what files/configurations will be damaged ?
  3. what kind of back up will be efficient for my requirement ?

Any suggestions on the best practices/ tips for backing up Jenkins will be of great help.

Thank you

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1788

Answers (1)

matt freake
matt freake

Reputation: 5090

What kind of crashes is expected in Jenkins ?
In case of failure, what files/configurations will be damaged ?
what kind of back up will be efficient for my requirement ?

I don't believe there are crashes that specific to Jenkins that are expected. The issues are the same as with any other mission-critical application; hardware-failures, software failures, or as the Jenkins Continuous Integration Cookbook says "Coffee on motherboard, cat eats cable, cable eats cat"

To ensure you have the back up that is efficient for your requirements, test it on a Dev Jenkins server. Set up backup, run some builds, break as much as you can, restore the backup. Is everything you need restored? You will almost certainly need a Dev Jenkins server, in order to test new versions of plugins and of Jenkins itself, without disrupting your production CI process.

Regarding backup, thinBackup and periodicBackup, I don't believe thinBackup backs-up the previous builds, just their results, so if you need these, it may not be suitable. backup is no longer maintained so I would look at periodic backup. You can also look at backing up the JENKINS_HOME directory directly, as this is where all the builds, config, etc are stored. Check with your operations team that if the Java environment Jenkins runs using is lost or damaged, that too can be restored.

Upvotes: 1

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