This page summarizes key activities around Custom WAR Packager. Everyone is welcome to contribute to the projects referenced in this document, and to propose more changes.
Custom WAR Packager was introduced in April 2018, and at that point its main purpose was to package WAR files for Jenkins ATH and Plugin Compatibility Tester. We kept expanding it to support more features (Docker image packaging, Jenkinsfile Runner packaging, etc.). Finally we ended up with a really handy tool which serves multiple production use-cases as well as Jenkins testing needs. The tool has outgrown the original design of the test tool.
All of the changes retained the backward compatibility of the YAML configuration format.
The configuration format became too complicated and, at the same time, it is not extensible well enough (see the buildSettings specification for example).
JENKINS-55832 was a final trigger. It drastically decreased the clean build time, but there was no way to keep CWP compatible by default.
I decided to start working on Custom WAR Packager 2.0 which will introduce a new configuration format and better extensibility for CWP as a library.
- Key configuration format changes
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Multiple "source" inputs, not just a single one (YAML, pom, or BOM).
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Multiple destination settings so that WAR, Docker and JFR can be configured separately.
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Make WAR file and optional packaging format so that we can introduce features which cannot be packaged into WAR (e.g. Pipeline Libraries in the current state).
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Support for "environments" so that multiple custom packages can be created from a single definition.
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Deeper integration with Configuration-as-Code Plugin, including templating and conditional configurations.
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Support for defining Jenkins Pipeline Libraries and other shared resources.
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Add support for the Plugin Bill of Materials which simplifies the plugin version management.
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- Key internal changes
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Increase reliability of packaging by verifying plugin compatibility.
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Integrate the plugin management codebase with the Plugin Installation Manager tool.
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Change the default source of plugin information to Jenkins Update Centers to speedup builds.
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Change the Jenkinsfile Runner packaging backend to use the new Packaging Parent POM.
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- Status
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Custom WAR Packager 2.x is available for preview (alpha release). Not all planned features have been implemented yet.
There is parallel project which has been started as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020 (project page).
The main idea behind the project is to build a customizable Jenkins distribution service that could be used to build tailor-made Jenkins distributions. The service would provide users with a simple interface to select the configurations they want to build the instance with eg: plugins, authorization matrices etc. Furthermore it would include a section for sharing community created distros so that users can find and download already built Jenkins war/configuration files to use out of the box.
- Status
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The project is available for preview as a self-hosted service.
Another application of Custom WAR Packager, specifically designed for Kubernetes environments. It would allow building Jenkins and Jenkinsfile Runner images based on source code definitions in a repository, e.g. upon a request or upon an SCM change. Such operator functionality can be a part of Jenkins Operator for Kubernetes, or a standalone project.
- Status
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The project has not been started yet.
Custom WAR Packager 1.x is in the maintenance mode. There are no features planned for this branch, but there might be some bugfixes backported to it. The recent alpha releases of Custom WAR Packager 2.x are considered to be stable enough. Users are advised to use them if they want to get access to new features and performance improvements.