Configuration as Code: The Job DSL Plugin

This is one in a series of blog posts in which various CloudBees technical experts have summarized presentations from the Jenkins User Conferences (JUC). This post is written by Valentina Armenise, solutions architect, CloudBees. In this presentation, Daniel Spilker, CoreMedia AGs, maintainer of the plugin, shows how to configure a Jenkins Job without using the GUI at JUC Berlin.

Daniel Spilker, from CoreMedia, at the JUC 2014 in Berlin, presented the DSL plugin and showed how the Configuration as a Code Approach can simplify the orchestration of complex workflow pipelines.

The goal of the plugin is to create new pipelines fast and easily using the preferred tools to “code” the configuration as opposite of using different plugins and jobs to set up complex workflows through the GUI.

Indeed, the DSL plugin defines a new way to describe a Jenkins Job configuration by the use of Groovy Language piece of code stored in a single file.

After installing the plugin a new option will be available in the list of build steps: “process JOB DSL” which will allow you to parse the DSL script.

The descriptive groovy file can be either uploaded in Jenkins manually or stored in the SCM and pulled in a specific job.

The jobs whose configuration is described in the DSL script will be created on the fly so that the user is responsible for maintaining the groovy script only.