Hudson / Jenkins: share parameters between several

Question

I have about 20 jobs using common parameters (user, password), and sometimes the password expires... So I have to change it on all jobs, which is really time consuming (and error prone, I may forget one).

I thought about:

• using a kind of magic property file if that exists to have directly lines like KEY, VALUE added into job parameters
• adding the same kind of KEY, VALUE pair directly inside build.xml, but where ? And it's really ugly... Maybe with a dedicated XML embedded into the build.xml ?
• calling a slave job that would (how ?) push up to the parent one the desired values...

As you can see I'm only starting in Hudson/Jenkins (I'm using Jenkins 1.424.2.2), thanks for your help !

EDIT: I'm not admin of the Jenkins instance, so I cannot have access to global properties...

Answer 1

Go to your Jenkins home and navigate :

1. Manage Jenkins >
2. Configure System >
3. Global properties >
4. Environment variables > ....

Answer 2

I eventually succeeded by:

• keeping encrypted credentials in a web page
• retrieving them in Hudson thanks to a shell script (wget), decrypt them, and creating a build.properties file in the workspace with lines name=value (in my case ssh.password=...)

This works, because Ant build steps detect this file and pass the variables inside into their context. Thanks to that I could centralize my credentials.

Answer 3

I can think of two approaches:

• Use Global properties, found under Manage Jenkins -> Configure system. Here you can define environment variables that should be available to all jobs.

• Write a small script that downloads, modifies and posts the job config: http://[jenkinshost]/job/[jobname]/config.xml.

You can read about the api capabilities under http://[jenkinshost]/job/[jobname]/api, here is what it says about reading and changing config.xml:

Fetch/Update config.xml

To programmatically obtain config.xml, hit [http://[jenkinshost]/job/[jobname]/config.xml]. You can also POST an updated config.xml to the same URL to programmatically update the configuration of a job.