Which Continuous Integration System is the easiest to reestablish on a new machine from backup?_问答_开发者

I have had the pleasure of using Hudson (now Jenkins) for a few years now, and I like the general attitude of the system - it's really a nice program - but the focus is elsewhere than one thing I need to get running well.

This is, well, if something happens to our build server and we need to rebuild it from backup tapes (of the whole workarea), this is not easily done with Jenkins. As we do not as such rely on any Jenkins-specific features, I was considering if other CI systems have a better method in place.

Basically we have multiple Eclipse projects next to each other when extracted from git. Each build entry points to an ant script in one of the projects which is then built. We need full flexibility with the version of Ant and Java used. This can perfectly well be described in a "launch configuration"-file somewhere in the pr开发者_如何学JAVAoject so all that is needed is to point at (or perhaps even auto-discover) said launch file.

It would be better, if the history could be established too etc, but I'd really like just to be able to get the jobs back up and running.

Any recommendations?

(Note 2013-02-18: We migrated our build process to Maven. This simplified the Jenkins configuration greatly and made this question less important. It is still nice to know if you can bootstrap a CI-configuration easily from backup tapes or scratch (based on information stored in the various pom files))

It's fairly easy to backup Jenkins.

Backup all your config files. I have a Jenkins job that runs once an hour, scans for any config.xml changes, or additions, and adds/updates them in our Perforce server. In addition it gives me the ability to rollback to an old config , if I mess up a config bad enough, just by doing a sync in Perforce.
Backup your plugins. I just backup the .hpi files, again into perforce. That way I don't have to remember what plugins I have on my server, should I need to rebuild it.
Backup your workspace dir. This one I don't do, as my CI builds I don't care about, and my nightly builds are stored on another server. I found the Jenkins copy to be very very slow, so I copy all artifats/sources inside my build scripts instead, to an archive server, that is backed up nightly, by IT already(it's a san). The only problem with this, is I can't point a Jenkins job artifacts to a separate location and have Jenkins link them as artifacts. I haven't found a plugin to do this, and the plugin I've been writing to do it is coming along slow. But it's not too bad of a tradeoff.

These 3 allow me to restore Jenkins, but without log files(I don't really need them, as long as I have the output, tee.exe is your friend) in a pretty short order should my server ever die.

This probably is not a direct answer to your question, but...

We've been using Jenkins (formerly Hudson) for just over a year and a half now. We have not used any feature that is Jenkins specific that I would not get on other CI systems. However, after going through configurations of buildbot and CruiseControl (sorry, please don't hate me) initially, I found that the plethora of plugins available and the general ease of use of Jenkins made the choice a no-brainer. We now have 86 projects building, and have two servers - one for development, and one for QA and Release builds.

As for backups, we actually back up the entire Jenkins home folder once a week (for both servers). Once every month, we back up all our virtual machines (entire virtual hard disk).

Note that both our servers and all slaves are VMs.

This way, if something goes wrong, I can restore at least the job configurations easily - the oldest it will be is one week.

The repository has all the latest code anyway, and the virtual machines can be brought back to a version which is (at most) one month old.

Also, Jenkins has a backup plugin - https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Backup+Plugin - which makes it quite easy to back up at least the configuration.

Considering that backup is not the primary function of a CI system, chances are all of them are going to have their own quirks for backup and restore.

Just my 2 paisa/cents/pence.