How to trigger a build only if changes happen on particular set of files

Question

How do I tell Jenkins/Hudson to trigger a build only for changes on a particular project in my Git tree?

Answer 1

If the logic for choosing the files is not trivial, I would trigger script execution on each change and then write a script to check if indeed a build is required, then triggering a build if it is.

Answer 2

Basically, you need two jobs. One to check whether files changed and one to do the actual build:

Job #1

This should be triggered on changes in your Git repository. It then tests whether the path you specify ("src" here) has changes and then uses Jenkins' CLI to trigger a second job.

export JENKINS_CLI="java -jar /var/run/jenkins/war/WEB-INF/jenkins-cli.jar"
export JENKINS_URL=http://localhost:8080/
export GIT_REVISION=`git rev-parse HEAD`
export STATUSFILE=$WORKSPACE/status_$BUILD_ID.txt

# Figure out, whether "src" has changed in the last commit
git diff-tree --name-only HEAD | grep src

# Exit with success if it didn't
$? || exit 0

# Trigger second job
$JENKINS_CLI build job2 -p GIT_REVISION=$GIT_REVISION -s

Job #2

Configure this job to take a parameter GIT_REVISION like so, to make sure you're building exactly the revision the first job chose to build.