Jenkins Release Plugin

What is it?

This plugin aims to automate several tasks of the release process of InspectIT. It offers the following features:

• update / create JIRA Tickets
• update / create JIRA Releases
• publish release notes and artifacts on GitHub
• publish release notes on Confluence
• publish status updates on Twitter
• publish measurement points in an InfluxDB

How to use it

This project uses Apache Maven. Execute

mvn clean install hpi:hpi -DskipTests=true

to create the .hpi file. This file can then be installed to your Jenkins Instance using the Jenkins settings / advanced menu.

Jenkins Configuration

Variables

Build Parameters as well as Environment Variables can be accessed from every field using the ${variablename} syntax. The plugin will then replace this placeholder with the actual contents of the parameter or variable named variablename.

Credentials

The plugin adds two new credential types to your Jenkins: one for access a certain JIRA Project, and another one for accessing Confluence. These credentials can be entered using the Jenkins credentials settings, a screenshot of the JIRA credentials dialog is given below. Note that these dialogs do automatically check whether JIRA / Confluence is accessible using the data you entered.

Adding and Modifying JIRA Tickets

To add or Modify Tickets, add the JIRA Ticket Editor Build-Step to your project. There are two ways to select the Tickets to be modified:

1. Enter a JIRA-Query-Language (JQL) statement selecting your tickets
2. If the Build was triggered by the GitHub Pull Request Builder Plugin, you can give a regular expression to extract the Ticket-Keys from the commit messages of the pull request.

Afterwards, you can select the modifications to apply to the tickets matching these criteria.

In a similar way, new JIRA Tickets can be published:

Adding and Modifying JIRA Releases

Select the Add / Modify JIRA Project Versions build-step. Using this buildstep, you can modify or add multiple project versions. If the given version name already exists, it is updated, otherwise a new version for the project is created.

Publishing Release Notes on Confluence

The bundle also offers a build step called Publish Release Notes on Confluence which creates a confluence page. This confluence page contains a list of tickets, selected using a JQL Query provided by the user. Below you can see an example configuration, including the page which it creates.

Publishing Releases on GitHub

This feature is available as the Publish A Release on GitHub post-build action. Using this action, you can create a release on GitHub and upload build artifacts to it. The release description works in the same manner as for the confluence release notes page.

Twitter Publisher

This build step offers you the possibility to publish a Twitter status update. The build step checks whether a recent tweet with the same text already exists in order to prevent duplicate tweets.

InfluxDB Publisher

The InfluxDB Publisher build step allows you to add measurement points to an InfluxDB instance. The measurement points are given to the plugin in the format specified here.