Migrating Maven Jenkins jobs to FreeStyleJobs due to JDK 1.6 incompatibility
Posted by Admin • Tuesday, March 15. 2016 • Category: DevOps, Linux
Soon after Jenkins 1.609.1 support for JDK 1.6 was dropped altogether. This means that you can run jobs with whatever JDK you want as long as you are not using the Maven job type. Maven jobs require JDK 1.7 or higher (actually they run on whatever version the master is using, ignoring the JDK setting in the job configuration). This is a big deal for a shop that does extensive cross-platform testing. There are two solutions:
Initially I tried doing this using JobDSL, but that is way too time-consuming and hard to maintain. The simplest approach is to take the job XML, make minimal changes and push it back. Except that it's not that simple - you can't change the job type. You need to create new jobs, which is why I wrote a script to do all of the above. It will move the pre/post builders to the main builder list, and create a new maven job step in between. The rest is left unchanged and most of the XML is naturally valid for this version of jenkins/plugins since it's pulled from the live Jenkins.
- Convert hundreds (in our case) of Maven jobs to regular (freestyle) jobs. There appears to be no simple script to do this, so I wrote one here
- Use maven toolchains to compile and test with a different JDK. Although converting jobs is a viable option that requires no additional setup, using toolchains may be preferred in some cases. For one thing, Jenkins offers the "Perform Release" button on maven jobs, something that is difficult to emulate in freestyle jobs.
Initially I tried doing this using JobDSL, but that is way too time-consuming and hard to maintain. The simplest approach is to take the job XML, make minimal changes and push it back. Except that it's not that simple - you can't change the job type. You need to create new jobs, which is why I wrote a script to do all of the above. It will move the pre/post builders to the main builder list, and create a new maven job step in between. The rest is left unchanged and most of the XML is naturally valid for this version of jenkins/plugins since it's pulled from the live Jenkins.
