creating jenkins jobs with ansible

Question

I'm working on a project to deploy a jenkins CI server on centos7 using ansible And I'm having problems creating jenkins jobs from an xml template using ansible.

Everything works fine so far, but now i want to be able to create jobs, and give them some basic configuration from an xml file using ansible. My solution was the following command from jenkins-cli:

sudo java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://localhost:8080 create-job Job_test1 < Job_test1.xml

this works perfectly when entered manually in the centos7 box, but when i put it into ansible and run it:

- name: create jenkins jobs with xml files
  sudo: yes
  command: "java -jar {{ jenkins.cli_dest }} -s http://localhost:8080 create-job {{ item.name }} < {{ jenkins_dest }}/{{ item.xml_name }}"
  with_items: jenkins_jobs

it gives the following error message:

stderr: Too many arguments: <
java -jar jenkins-cli.jar create-job NAME
Creates a new job by reading stdin as a configuration XML file.

Does anyone know a solution to this? As far as I can see I'm doing it properly(since the command works when not entered by ansible)

Answer 1

I manage my jenkins CI/CD pipelines and setup with ansible, and I rely heavily on available libraries (groovy DSL, python jenkins-job-builder) and template the guts of the the jenkins XML config using jinja2. I got asked to showcase what can be done with ansible at a local meetup, and have been working some code that I will be delivering and sharing at that meetup in the new year. I seriously think this stuff could help you a lot, I currently use this setup in my current project and can't imagine managing jenkins any other way.

https://github.com/Azulinho/ansible-jenkins-showcase

Answer 2

You can use shell redirection by executing the shell. For example, the command 'sh "echo test > hello.txt"' will work as intended. Just wrap the whole command with something like '/bin/sh "java ...>..."'.

Answer 3

The command module doesn't support input and output redirection since it doesn't pass the command string to a shell. This is what its documentation says:

It will not be processed through the shell, so variables like $HOME and operations like "<", ">", "|", and "&" will not work (use the shell module if you need these features).

So:

- name: create jenkins jobs with xml files
  sudo: yes
  shell: "java -jar {{ jenkins.cli_dest }} -s http://localhost:8080 create-job {{ item.name }} < {{ jenkins_dest }}/{{ item.xml_name }}"
  with_items: jenkins_jobs