Verifying if certain plug-in is installed and setting a new proxy in Jenkins using CLI

What ho lads!

Few days ago I was talking with Olivier Renault [1] about few things that he needs to deploy JinFeng [1] using a non-interactive command line. JinFeng is an integration and testing platform built on top of many Open Source tools, like TestLink [2] and Jenkins [3]. One of the features he needs is Test Steps in TestLink XML-RPC API (I’m working on this, and hopefully will be able to provide a patch for TestLink 1.9.4).

Installing plug-ins from command line

Jenkins only needs a JVM to be executed but JinFeng also needs TestLink plug-in installed. So the trick here is to use Jenkins CLI [4] to tell Jenkins we want it to download and install the plug-in. Jenkins CLI is a command line client for Jenkins.

The command to install plug-ins is quite simple and intuitive.

java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://localhost:8080 install-plugin testlink

Additional hacks #1: Checking if the plug-in is already installed

I haven’t had the chance to try JinFeng 0.2 yet, but I believe its install script will be able to use existing Jenkins or TestLink installations. So we need to check if TestLink plug-in is already installed, right?

Jenkins CLI has some built-in commands, like install-plugin. But it doesn’t have a built-in command to check if a plug-in is already installed. So a workaround is to use the groovy command, that executes Groovy scripts in Jenkins (you may find convenient to use the groovysh command too, to execute your Groovy scripts, or http://localhost:8080/script for a web Groovy console).

Here is a sample script that checks if a plug-in is already installed or not.

[gist][/gist]

Now you can execute this script as following: cat ~/script1.groovy | java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://localhost:8080 groovy = It will output 1 if Jenkins has the plug-in installed, or 0 otherwise.

What if I’m using a proxy?

That’s doable as well. Here’s another script for setting the proxy settings in Jenkins.

[gist][/gist]

You may be wondering how I’m creating these scripts. I’ll blog about that later. But here’s a quick explanation. I checked out Jenkins sources from GitHub, then imported the project in Eclipse. Then I create an empty class there, with a main method. Finally, I write what I would like to have in a Groovy script, but in Java. The last step is just convert it to Groovy, and voilà!

Hope it helps other people too. If you use many scripts for administering Jenkins, you may be interested in Scriptler plug-in [5] too. They even have a scripts repository. Awesome, no? You can download the scripts mentioned in this post from there too. I simply love Jenkins community.

Cheers

[1] http://www.sqaopen.net/ [2] http://www.teamst.org [3] http://www.jenkins-ci.org [4] https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Jenkins+CLI [5] http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Scriptler+Plugin