Terraform Jenkins

Installation

You can easily install the latest version with the following :

go get -u github.com/dihedron/terraform-provider-jenkins

Then add the plugin to your local .terraformrc :

cat >> ~/.terraformrc <<EOF
providers {
    jenkins = "${GOPATH}/bin/terraform-provider-jenkins"
}
EOF

Usage

In order to create Jobs inside of your Jenkins installation, you need to describe them in your Terraform file (.tf).

Unfortunately Jenkins APIs lack abstraction and in order to create a Job you need to post the whole XML file (config.xml) describing the Job. This can be done either by embedding the XML inside the .tf file or providing the path to a file that contains the Job template.

This provider allows to create a template Job descriptor in XML format with variables, and then specifying the values in the resource descriptor in the Terraform file:

resource "jenkins_job" "second" {
	name 				  			   = "Second"
	display_name					   = "The Second Project Display Name"
	description			  			   = "The second job is created from a file on disk"
	disabled						   = true
	parameters  					   = {
		KeepDependencies 			   = true,
		GitLabConnection			   = "http://gitlab.example.com/my-second-project/project.git",
		TriggerOnPush				   = true,
		TriggerOnMergeRequest		   = true,
		TriggerOpenMergeRequestOnPush  = "never",
		TriggerOnNoteRequest           = true,
		NoteRegex                      = "Jenkins please retry a build",
		CISkip                         = true,
		SkipWorkInProgressMergeRequest = true,
		SetBuildDescription            = true,
		BranchFilterType               = "All",
		SecretToken                    = "{AQAAABAAAAAQwt1GRY9q3ZVQO3gt3epgTsk5dMX+jSacfO7NOzm5Eyk=}",
		UserRemoteConfig			   = "https://gitlab.example.com/confmgmt/user-web.git",
		BranchSpec                     = "*/master",
		GenerateSubmoduleConfiguration = false,
	}
	template						   = "file://./job_template.xml"
}

The parameters section is a map whose keys can be arbitrarily defined to match those in the temaplate.

You can check the tests/ directory, where the main.tf provides both an embedded template and an external one (a separate job_template.xml in the same directory).

Where do I get the Job's XML template?

Create a Project manually, then look for the XML file that was created on the Jenkins server; that file is your starting point.

You can replace some of the hardcoded values you provided during the manual configuration process with template variables you can place in the parameters section. In order to learn how to work with "GOlang templates", just google it, there is plenty of documentation available. In a few words, if you place MYVar = MyValue in the parameters section, you can use {{ .MyVar }} and the provider will automatically replace it with MyValue.

The job_template.xml file was produced like this, and then edited to "templatise" some of the values.