How to take Jenkins master node offline using CLI?

Question

I have been manually taking the master (and only) node offline whenever I sync our development database to avoid a bunch of false test failures. I have a script that does the full DB import and would like to automate the node maintenance as well.

How can I mark the master node temporarily offline using the command-line interface JAR?

• I wrote a simple Bash script to execute Jenkins tasks.

• I can authenticate using that script.

  $ jenkins who-am-i
  Authenticated as: david
  Authorities:
    david
    authenticated
  

• However, I cannot get offline-node or online-node to recognize the master node. The help states that I can omit the node name for "master", but that doesn't work.

  $ jenkins offline-node
  Argument "NAME" is required
  java -jar jenkins-cli.jar online-node NAME
  Stop using a node for performing builds temporarily, until the next "online-node" command.
   NAME                : Slave name, or empty string for master
  

  It seems to be looking specifically for a slave, but I need to take the master's executor offline.

  $ jenkins offline-node master
  No such slave "master" exists. Did you mean "null"?
  

Answer 1

If you only have one build executor on the master and no standalone build nodes, use this command instead:

java -jar jenkins-cli.jar quiet-down

This will stop any new builds from executing. You can use

java -jar jenkins-cli.jar cancel-quiet-down

to put Jenkins back on line; at this point it will run any builds that were queued up while it was offline.

Answer 2

It's not exactly intuitive, but the Jenkins documentation is correct. If you want to specify the master node for offline-node or online-node, use the empty string:

java -jar jenkins-cli.jar offline-node ""

That said, you should probably use @gareth_bowles answer anyways in case you add slaves in the future.